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WHAT IS YOUR CHILD READING IN SCHOOL?

HOW STANDARDS AND TEXTBOOKS INFLUENCE

EDUCATION

HEARING

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION,

LABOR, AND PENSIONS

UNITED STATES SENATE

ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

ON

EXAMINING CONFLICTS TAKING PLACE OVER STATE HISTORY STANDARDS AND HISTORY TEXTBOOKS, FOCUSING ON HOW STANDARDS

AND TEXTBOOKS INFLUENCE EDUCATION

SEPTEMBER 24, 2003

Printed for the use of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

(
COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS

JUDD GREGG, New Hampshire, Chairman

BILL FRIST, Tennessee

MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming

LAMAR ALEXANDER, Tennessee

CHRISTOPHER S. BOND, Missouri

MIKE DEWINE, Ohio

PAT ROBERTS, Kansas

JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama

JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada

LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina

JOHN W. WARNER, Virginia

EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts

CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut

TOM HARKIN, Iowa

BARBARA A. MIKULSKI, Maryland

JAMES M. JEFFORDS (I), Vermont

JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico

PATTY MURRAY, Washington

JACK REED, Rhode Island

JOHN EDWARDS, North Carolina

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, New York

SHARON R. SODERSTROM, Staff Director

J. MICHAEL MYERS, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel

(II)
CONTENTS

STATEMENTS

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2003

Page

Alexander, Hon. Lamar, a U.S. Senator from the State of Tennessee, opening

statement .............................................................................................................. 1

Gregg, Hon. Judd, a U.S. Senator from the State of New Hampshire, prepared

statement .............................................................................................................. 1

Ravitch, Diane, Research Professor, New York University, New York, NY;

Gilbert Sewall, Director, American Textbook Council, New York, NYU;

Sandra Stotsky, Former Senior Associate Commissioner, Massachusetts Department of Education, Malden, MA; and Robert Hagopian, Teacher, Scotts

Valley Middle School, Scotts Valley, CA ............................................................ 9

Prepared statements of:

Diane Ravitch ............................................................................................ 13

Gilbert Sewall ............................................................................................ 18

Sandra Stotsky .......................................................................................... 22

Robert Hagopian ........................................................................................ 43

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

Statements, articles, publications, letters, etc.:

Resolution, Boston City Council ...................................................................... 25

How Study of the Holocaust is Turning America Into Amerika, Sandra

Stotsky ........................................................................................................... 25

Stephen Driesler, Executive Director, Association of American Publishers,

School Division, prepared statement ........................................................... 56

Standards for Evaluating Instructional Materials for Social Content (2000

Edition), California Department of Education ........................................... 58

(III)

(1)

WHAT IS YOUR CHILD READING IN SCHOOL?

HOW STANDARDS AND TEXTBOOKS INFLUENCE EDUCATION

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2003

U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR, AND PENSIONS, Washington, DC.

The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:06 a.m., in room

SD–430, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Lamar Alexander,

presiding.

Present: Senators Alexander and Ensign.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ALEXANDER

Senator ALEXANDER. [presiding]. The committee will please come

to order.

I want to welcome the witnesses and the audience. This is the

first of a series of hearings planned by Chairman Judd Gregg on

intellectual diversity in American education, and the first topic focuses on textbooks as well as standards.

Senator Gregg looks forward to all these hearings. He is not able

to join the hearing today because of other commitments, but he has

prepared a very good opening statement, and we will include that

opening statement in the record.

[The prepared statement of Senator Gregg follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR GREGG

Today’s hearing is the first in a series of hearings I intend to

hold on intellectual diversity—or rather the lack thereof—in our

nation’s primary, secondary and postsecondary classrooms.

On the primary and secondary level, there appears to be an everincreasing tendency to scrub textbooks, State assessments and

even State standards of anything that may have the remotest

chance of offense. The result is a homogenized curriculum that robs

children of a balanced and accurate depiction of both history and

the world around them.

We are judging the past through the lens of today’s values,

standards and norms, and taking historical figures and decisions

out of context. This is historically dishonest and distorts students’

understanding of time and place.

For example, discussing the inspiring true story of Mary McLeod

Bethune—an African American woman who defied the odds to

found a school for African American girls in Florida in the early

twentieth century—is not allowed. Why? Because she named her
2

school the ‘‘Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for

Negro Girls’’—and you can’t say ‘‘negro’’ even though it is historically accurate and integral to the story.

We also hear reports of stories about owls being deleted from

reading passages because in some cultures the owl is associated

with death, and death is scary to children.

The inanity of these examples is just the tip of the iceberg. We

learn that many publishers of textbooks and assessments avoid

terms such as: ‘‘American’’, ‘‘backward’’, ‘‘dogma’’, ‘‘Founding Fathers’’, ‘‘heroine’’, ‘‘early man’’, and ‘‘substandard English.’’

We learn that classic tales like Aesop’s Fables are found to be too

controversial because of gender stereotypes embedded in such tales

as the ‘‘Fox and the Crow.’’

However, nowhere is this unbalanced perspective demonstrated

better or more routinely than in the subject of history—which

brings us to the purpose of today’s hearing: an examination of the

quality of our nation’s history textbooks, assessments and standards.

We are here today to shed light on the fact that textbooks, assessments and even some State standards have succumbed to the

pressures of the political correctness movement.

Various studies show that our students lack not only raw knowledge of key historical facts and concepts, but also a balanced view

of the world, and for that matter, an appreciation for American and

Western contributions to society.

There is empirical evidence that we are shortchanging children

of a basic knowledge of our nation’s past.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress’s U.S. History

exam (a voluntary national test) confirms the woeful decline in students’ knowledge of American history: • Well over half of twelfth graders scored below the basic level

on the most recent exam, indicating little to no comprehension of

U.S. History. • Less than one out of five students scored at or above the proficient level in U.S. History. This tiny fraction of students scoring

at the proficient level is smaller in history than any other subject

tested by NAEP.

• According to the NAEP Civics exam, nearly 1⁄3 of students

scored below the basic level, indicating no mastery or comprehension of the structures, functions, values and process of our government.

Sadly, the poor performance trend in history and civics extends

into college. A recent poll of seniors at the nation’s top 55 liberal

arts colleges found that less than 1⁄4 could identify James Madison

as the ‘‘father of the Constitution,’’ and over 1⁄3 were unable to

identify the U.S. Constitution as establishing our government’s division of power.

Extensive research documents that textbooks—which often contain bias and inaccuracies—are presenting a distorted picture of

America, weakening students’ civic engagement, and depressing

student achievement by diminishing interest in U.S. and World

History.

In Texas alone, over 500 factual errors were found in a study of

more than two dozen social studies textbooks used in the State.
3

Content reviewers discovered hundreds more problems concerning

insufficient or distorted discussion of key people, places and events.

For example, one textbook devoted four pages to capitalism, while

socialism merited 18 pages and communism 45 pages. Another

textbook mistook John Marshall for John Jay as the first Supreme

Court justice. The list of bias and errors goes on and on.

Historian Diane Ravitch, one of our witnesses, found that textbook publishers and assessment companies ‘‘sugarcoat practices in

non-western cultures that they would condemn if done by Europeans or Americans.’’

Our children read textbooks that sanitize the treatment of

women in Arab countries today and yet are critical of women being

denied admission to a school in New Spain in the 17th century—

failing to note that the school was founded to educate priests and

clerics.

They learn that slavery was exclusively a practice of Western

Europeans, when in reality slavery has been practiced in almost all

societies throughout the world.

They read such misleading and denigrating text as ‘‘Do you notice that the Chinese seem to have thought of a lot of things before

Europeans did? The Chinese were weaving silk and making beautiful artifacts when most Europeans were living in caves and wearing animal skins’’—despite historical evidence showing that Europeans wove linen and patterned fabrics as early as the 4th millennium BC, whereas the Chinese weren’t weaving silk until the late

3rd millennium BC.

A recent report by one of our witnesses, Gilbert Sewall of the

American Textbook Council, examined about 20 commonly used social studies textbooks and found that their content is growing thinner, yet increasingly critical of the U.S. and Western civilization.

In many of these textbooks, other civilizations are glorified, their

problems and abuses glossed over, while American struggles and

mistakes are highlighted at the expense of our greatest achievements to the degree that many students conclude America is a

hopelessly flawed and deeply troubled country.

Examples of the anti-American slant in textbooks are not rare.

Veteran history teacher and author Peter Gibbon, who taught

American History for many years using a variety of textbooks,

writes: ‘‘There is much in these texts now about income inequality,

environmental degradation, the horrors of immigration, and the

hardships of the western frontier. . . . Contemporary history books

cover in detail the Vietnam War and our shameful treatment of

Native Americans. Little mention is made in them, however, of genius or heroism. . . . From many of our textbooks, one would not

know that in the span of human history, the United States has

stood for peace, wealth and accomplishment and has made possible

millions of quiet and contented lives.’’

This concern regarding the overemphasis of America’s shortcomings is not limited to conservatives.

The American Federation of Teachers’ Albert Shanker Institute

(hardly known as a bastion of conservative thought) similarly decries the dearth of civic knowledge and pride in our youngsters.

The Shanker report represents a consensus of concern among political right and left, and is notable for the wide range of signato-
4

ries it attracted, including former President Bill Clinton, and esteemed historian David McCullough.

The Shanker treatise cites a growing body of research confirming

a strong bias against America in the U.S. and World History textbooks most widely used in our schools.

According to the report, today’s students show little sign of having cultivated the necessary understanding and appreciation for

America and its values to enable them to preserve our democracy.

‘‘In too many instances,’’ the report notes, ‘‘America’s sins, slights

and shortcomings have become not just a piece of the story but its

essence.’’

If our children are being told such a negative story, it is no wonder that they show such little interest and pride in our national

history. And so we must ask ourselves: how did we let this happen?

Compounding this anti-American bias, publishers routinely ban

certain words, phrases, topics and images, some of which are offensive but historically accurate, and some of which defy common

sense.

Why? Because the content of textbooks has been hijacked by bias

committees that review all such materials. These bias committees

serve as academic thought police by severely limiting what children

encounter in instructional materials.

Dr. Ravitch, in her book, has documented the existence of a voluntary form of censorship in our textbooks, in which the publishers

adhere to strict ‘‘bias and sensitivity guidelines,’’ taking pains not

to offend anyone on the political right or left.

This is a classic case of good intentions gone awry. What began

as a worthwhile effort decades ago to ensure that different gender

and ethnic groups were portrayed in a balanced way has been

taken to extremes, with absolute numerical parity demanded and

a litany of words and phrases that are banned.

Publishers and their writers bend to the will of interest groups

who demand that no one ever be represented in anything less than

an ideal light—regardless of the facts.

This censorship has led to the creation of senseless instructional

materials that bear more resemblance to utopia than the world we

live in.

The influence of bias committees does not extend just to publishers—it also extends to assessments and even State standards. We

asked a handful of States, publishers and assessment companies to

provide us with their bias guidelines. Although we have heard from

several of the education firms, we have only heard from one of the

States we contacted.

We intend to continue to cull through the materials sent to us,

as I remain concerned that it is bias committees and sensitivity

guidelines in conjunction with the influence of special interests

groups that have contributed to the anemic, homogenized and even

hostile curriculums to which many of our children are exposed. It

is my hope to bring further attention to the problems posed by

many of these guidelines and special interests.

Although textbooks and assessments are part of the problem, no

discussion of history or civics education can be complete without

consideration of State standards. Unfortunately, the influence of
5

the censorship and political correctness movements extends to this

arena, too.

Since the publishers and assessment companies must to some degree mold their products to State standards, those standards impact how history is presented to our students.

Although today 48 States and the District of Columbia have

spelled out in some form what children ought to learn in history

and civics, many States do not have clear and thoughtful standards

in these areas.

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, released

today, shows we still have a long way to go before all States have

established clear and logical curricular frameworks. The report

analyzed 48 States’ and the District of Columbia’s social studies

and U.S. History standards for comprehensive historical content,

sequential development and balance. Fordham awarded 11 States

As and Bs, 7 States Cs, and 31 States Ds or Fs.

The report found that the majority of State standards neglect

some of the most important historical figures, and political, social,

cultural and economic events, and fall prey either to right-wing

glossing over past injustices or left-wing politically correct posturing. Eleventh graders in one State, for example, are instructed to

‘‘analyze the reasons the United States is an imperialist nation,’’

while high school standards in another State neglect to cover the

rise of the KKK, the disenfranchisement of black voters and the

spread of Jim Crow laws following the Reconstruction. Both types

of misrepresentation are equally reprehensible and irresponsible.

The report also noted that: ‘‘Instead of correcting yesterday’s distortions by presenting a balanced and complete national history for

American students, State standards and curricula often replace old

distortions with new ones . . . today’s students can readily identify

Sacajawea and Harriet Tubman but often can barely discuss Washington or Jefferson—except as slave owners.’’

The Fordham study follows on the heels of a report by the Albert

Shanker Institute released earlier this year. The Shanker study

found most of the States’ standards to be inadequate, either stuffed

with too many specifics and no clear priorities, or too vague and

general to be useful to teachers.

The problem with history and civics education, like so many education issues, is not rooted in lack of money. Rather, the problem

is rooted in biased and skewed perspectives promulgated by weak

textbooks and standards.

Sadly, we will be unable to improve student knowledge and appreciation of the contributions of the U.S. and Western society if

we continue to provide children with textbooks and assessments

that lack an accurate, balanced, thought-provoking depiction of

both U.S. and World History.

As we know, much of the world is hostile to Western values, and

particularly American ideals and institutions. If we fail to demonstrate to our children why those ideals are worth fighting for,

and if we fail to offer our children a balanced view of U.S. History

and Western civilization, we risk letting those who oppose our

ideals define us.

Senator ALEXANDER. We have distinguished witnesses today.

Also following the way that Judd Gregg likes to do these so-called
6

hearings is to make them more of a discussion, because we want

to take advantage of the witnesses’ scholarship and experience. We

want to make that a part of the record. We want people to know

about it.

So the way that we will proceed is that I will make an opening

statement and then, starting with Dr. Ravitch and moving across

the line if that is all right, I will ask each of you to summarize your

statements in 5 to 7 minutes and give us a good sense of what is

there, make your major points, and then I will begin to ask questions, and as other Senators come, they will have a chance to do

that, but I would encourage you to comment on your fellow panel

members’ comments as we go along.

I want to commend Chairman Gregg for convening what I consider to be a critical hearing on the State of textbooks that are

used to teach our children. School textbooks today are in disarray.

They have become overly boring, overly sanitized, and at times blatantly inaccurate. Censorship based on political sensitivity is now

rampant in the textbook industry, and our children are suffering

for it.

Textbooks today are subjected to bias and sensitivity reviews

that are so stringent, much of our history and literature is

censored. I know that that has been mentioned in your testimony,

and I hope we get into a good discussion of these bias and sensitivity committees that Dr. Ravitch has written about especially.

Interestingly, this is not an ideological battle where forces of the

left are beating up the right or vice versa. In reality, reviewers

have bowed to the extremes of both sides, resulting in unintended

conspiracy to deny reality.

In practice, as Dr. Ravitch explains in her new book, ‘‘The Language Police’’—not too new; it has made a lot of bestseller lists—

both the right and the left work to exclude certain topics or phrases

that they find objectionable.

This morning, as an example, I visited a project of National History Day and U.S. News and World Report at the National Archives where they were announcing an effort which sounds to me

like a lot of fun and a good way to encourage the teaching of American history and civics. They are going to ask school kids to vote

on the 10 most important of 100 documents that are important in

American history. Then they will report all of that. Well, it will be

interesting to see what our students know about those documents

and what opinions they have about the documents.

But what is even more interesting is that if you go to the back

of Dr. Ravitch’s book where she records what the bias and sensitivity committees suggest teachers not say or textbooks not print,

most of the documents could not be studied in our schools in America.

I asked the interns in the office this morning just to run through

those 100 documents, and they disqualified at least 70 of the 100

from any American history or social studies classroom based upon

the advice of the bias and sensitivity committees which govern the

textbooks that most classrooms have. Words like ‘‘Founding Fathers’’ out-go about 10 documents. Words like ‘‘race’’ or subjects like

race—out goes Plessy v. Ferguson, a couple of Amendments to the

Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Religion—we would not
7

want to discuss religion in classrooms in America, and of course,

the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could therefore not be taught in a

classroom because it expressly mentions religion. ‘‘In God we

Trust,’’ even though it is the national motto approved by Congress,

could not be taught in the American classroom if you follow the advice of the bias and sensitivity committees.

So race, religion, and even three of the four major textbook bias

and sensitivity committees suggest that using the words ‘‘America’’

or ‘‘American’’ would not be appropriate, which wipes out maybe 1⁄3

of the important key documents in the United States.

I hope we can talk more about this. I know that your testimony

talks about it—but how did these bias and sensitivity committees

ever get so much control over what is taught or not taught in our

classrooms, leading to ridiculous outcomes?

Textbook publishers, who have a virtual monopoly on the market, are subject to immense pressures to portray life as interest

groups wish it were, and they are bowing to these special interests.

Not only do textbook companies routinely employ the bias and sensitivity reviews, like acknowledgment of the existence of Mount

Rushmore, which might offend certain Lakota Indians, but they

also attempt to preempt such reviews by providing guidelines to

authors prior to writing textbooks.

The impact of the pressure exerted on publishers reaches further

than just banning certain words and phrases. Information can be

wildly skewed. For example, in history books, it is now common to

read about pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas and their

contribution to culture, while ignoring or dismissing some of their

backward practices, such as the Aztec practice of human sacrifice.

At the same time, the accomplishments of European civilizations

are downplayed to the extent that some textbooks are more likely

to tell about a university in Timbuktu than one in Oxford or Cambridge.

Sometimes these practices lead to blatant falsehoods which the

writings of some of you have detailed. For example, it is not uncommon for American history textbooks to assert that the ideal of

American democracy is descended from the practices of Iroquois Indians, yet they produce no evidence that any of the Founding Fathers—a word we could not mention in the classroom—cited the Iroquois as the inspiration for the ideas in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Is it possible that some of the members of the Continental Congress knew of Iroquois practices? Yes.

Is it clear that it significantly influenced their views? No, so we

ought not to present it as a fact.

The last set of examples particularly concerns me. Since September 11, more than at any time in our generation, our country has

gone back to school on what it means to be an American, to know

our history and the values upon which our Nation was founded. In

many American history classrooms, our textbook is the curriculum.

Many teachers of American history were not students of history in

college and are dependent upon the textbook for material. So if the

textbooks are incomplete, misleading, or blatantly wrong, our children are growing up with a skewed view of our national identity

or no idea of our national identity. We have to put a stop to this.
8

Former American Federation of Teachers President Albert

Shanker once said at a meeting that I attended in Rochester, NY

that ‘‘The common school was invented to teach immigrant children

the three R’s and what it means to be an American, with the hope

they would go home and teach their parents.’’ The common school

therefore was founded to be one of the principal Americanizing institutions. How can we teach our children the values we share as

Americans if words describing them are banned by language police

at textbook companies?

For example, Congress made the national motto of our country

‘‘In God we Trust’’ in the 1950’s. Yet today, to mention ‘‘God’’ in a

textbook would cause a political earthquake.

Teachers must be free to discuss the fundamentally religious nature of our heritage and at the same time acknowledge the separation of Church and State, or at least the fact that we do not want

an establishment Church as provided for in the First Amendment.

On the Seal of the United States, a Latin phrase appears: ‘‘E

pluribus unum’’—‘‘Out of many, one.’’ How can we become one people, one America, if we cannot acknowledge our common culture?

How can our children understand our country if they do not know

the great struggles we face? Most of our political history has been

about two things—struggling to achieve the idealistic values we ascribe to and dealing with disappointments when we do not reach

them, and then balancing those competing values when they conflict with each other in the discussion of specific issues.

If our history books ignore these conflicts and deny those common values, our children will never know what it means to be an

America.

Our witnesses today are four, and I will introduce all four of

them and then ask them to proceed. And I will not give them the

full introduction that all four deserve; I will do it briefly.

First, Dr. Diane Ravitch is a research professor at New York

University School of Education and a nonresident Senior Fellow at

The Brookings Institution and one of the most eminent, if not the

most eminent, historian of American education. She is the former

Assistant Secretary of Education for the United States. She was in

charge of educational research and improvement from 1991 to

1993. She has won plaudits from both political parties and from

many people in this country. She was appointed, for example, to

the National Assessment Governing Board by Secretary Richard

Riley in 1997 during the Clinton Administration and was appointed

by President Bush as Assistant Secretary of Education.

Her new book, ‘‘The Language Police,’’ is almost a sourcebook for

this hearing or a discussion like this, in any event.

Gilbert Sewall is the distinguished president of the Center for

Education Studies, where he directs the American Textbook Council. He has reviewed a lot of history and social studies textbooks

in his time. He has authored many textbook reports. He is a former

instructor of history at Phillips Academy and professor at New

York University and Boston University. Like Dr. Ravitch, he has

written many books. He was education editor of Newsweek.

Dr. Sandra Stotsky was senior associate commissioner in the

Massachusetts Department of Education. She has directed complete revisions of the State’s standards in English, math, science,
9

history, geography, civics, and economics. Those standards are recognized by those who work as among the best in America and ones

which other States might well emulate.

Finally, Robert Hagopian, a teacher. He has taught eighth grade

United States history for more than 32 years, the last 30 of which

have been at Scotts Valley Middle School in Santa Cruz County,

CA. He is a member of the National Council for History Education.

He has a wide variety of academic plaudits, but for our purposes

today, his most important credential is that he is an eighth grade

teacher of United States history. We especially look forward to his

comments about what is happening in the classroom about textbooks and standards.

Dr. Ravitch, why don’t we begin with you?

STATEMENTS OF DIANE RAVITCH, RESEARCH PROFESSOR,

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, NY; GILBERT SEWALL,

DIRECTOR, AMERICAN TEXTBOOK COUNCIL, NEW YORK, NY;

SANDRA STOTSKY, FORMER SENIOR ASSOCIATE COMMISSIONER, MASSACHUSETTS DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION,

MALDEN, MA; AND ROBERT HAGOPIAN, TEACHER, SCOTTS

VALLEY MIDDLE SCHOOL, SCOTTS VALLEY, CA

Ms. RAVITCH. Good morning, Senator Alexander.

I must say that I was fortunate to serve under one of the great

Secretaries of Education in the United States, so it is a pleasure

to be here this morning.

What was particularly appropriate to me was that as I was on

the shuttle this morning, I read a front page story in The New

York Times that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s autobiography

has been edited, words have been deleted, in China to remove all

references to her comments about her experiences in China. I was

fascinated by this because, of course, it echoes so much of what I

saw as I was preparing the study that was published as ‘‘The Language Police.’’

I want to make a distinction, which is that many of the restrictions that were described in your opening statement apply more to

testing than to textbooks. The testing publishers are very rigorous

in that if any complaint comes in from any direction, they are very

fast to drop a word or a phrase and take it out. So you will sometimes see those phrases in textbooks. You will see some discussion

of religion; if anything, it tends to be almost reverential. One of the

problems in the world history textbooks is that they tend to tell the

story of each religion as that religion would want it to be told, because the material is not being presented historically; it is being

present as its adherents would like to see it presented, which is

also misleading, to teach, let us say, creation myths as if they were

historically documented.

I have had in my life in education two experiences that have

kind of broken me beyond the bounds of academia. One was working in the Department of Education and the other was working

over these past several years a member of the National Assessment

Governing Board. It was as a member of the NAGB board, or

NAGB, that I encountered this process called ‘‘bias and sensitivity

review.’’ I was astonished when the publisher, who had been selected by a consortium of test publishers, gave us guidelines and
10

told us, ‘‘These are the words, these are the topics, these are the

images that cannot be portrayed in any passage on a test.’’

These were not ethnic slurs or terms that really expressed bias

as anyone who would recognize it. These were ordinary words. For

example, a child cannot encounter the word ‘‘pumpkin.’’ Why can’t

a child encounter the word ‘‘pumpkin’’? Well, because that would

suggest Halloween, and Halloween would suggest witches, and

witches are frightening. Some of these things are just off-the-wall.

One of the stories that was deleted as a test topic was a story

about Mount Rushmore because, as you pointed out in the opening

statement, Mount Rushmore is offensive to the Lakota Tribe that

lives near it, apparently—at least the test publisher thinks so—so

Mount Rushmore cannot be portrayed in a standardized test.

The same thing for owls—owls are tabu. They frighten certain

children.

It just goes on and on—you cannot have a story about peanuts,

because some children are allergic to peanuts. I guess that would

carry over to tomatoes and to shrimp and to everything that anyone anywhere is allergic to.

What I did in ‘‘The Language Police’’ was a very carefully-documented study of the way that censorship has changed the content

in textbooks and in tests and the impact that it has had particularly in the fields of history and literature. This has happened first

of all because States have allowed these pressure groups to make

tremendous demands on the publishers, so the publishers now selfcensor in order to bring their materials to the marketplace. And as

a result of this self-censorship that goes on, I found close to 1,000

common words and phrases and topics and images that are routinely deleted from stories by the educational publishing industry.

Stories by well-known authors have been rewritten or deleted

from textbooks and from standardized tests because a bias and sensitivity review committee objects to certain topics or language.

Now, no one can possibly object to the removal of material that

expresses bias against a racial group or gender or any specific

group, but what few people realize today is that the educational

publishing industry is using a new definition of ‘‘bias’’ and ‘‘insensitivity’’ that defies common usage. In most instances that I have

found, words and topics that you will find in your daily newspaper

are routinely removed from textbooks stories and from tests.

Many of the classic American novels and stories like Mark

Twain’s ‘‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’’ or John Steinbeck’s

‘‘Grapes of Wrath’’—and you could extend this list on and on—

would have difficulty and in fact would not get passed a bias and

sensitivity review board today.

The result of this process called ‘‘bias and sensitivity review,’’

which is now the industry standard—it is done by every State, it

is done by every publisher of textbooks and tests—is that it dumbs

down educational materials, it reduces the vocabulary that children

encounter, and it withholds from students a realistic portrayal of

the world today.

Now, in my book, I give lots of examples from tests and also from

textbooks of material that has been dropped. I continue to get

emails from people in the publishing industry giving me additional

examples.
11

One that came to me just recently was that over this past summer, a bias review committee in New Jersey preparing a test for

11th grade high school students rejected a short story by the famous African American writer Langston Hughes because he used

the words ‘‘negro’’ and ‘‘colored person.’’ Those were the words that

were appropriate when he was writing, and we cannot Langston

Hughes’ prose or delete the words, so the story was out.

Every mass market publishers of textbooks and tests has what

they call ‘‘bias and sensitivity guidelines,’’ and these guidelines list

the words, topics and images that they will not permit writers or

illustrators to use. There is an extraordinary sensitivity to everyone’s self-esteem, including the self-esteem, apparently, of many

tyrannies. Just today, in fact this morning, I got a delivery by courier from the American Federation of Teachers of the newest issue

of The American Educator, in which I have an article called ‘‘Leaving Reality Out: How Textbooks Don’t Teach about Tyranny.’’ And

I reviewed six of the most widely-used world history textbooks and

examined how they deal with Cuba, China, fundamentalist Islam,

and Africa, and looking at how they deal in particular with tyrants.

How they deal with it is to be so even-handed that children are denied knowledge of what tyranny is. Children are supposed to learn

all the good things that Castro did in addition to repressing the

Cuban people. They are supposed to learn about all the wonderful

accomplishments of Mao and of his courage and his daring and how

he controlled inflation and reduced taxes—he just sounds like a

politician similar to those in our own society, except that he happens to be responsible for the deaths of 30 or 40 million people.

It is this kind of exquisite concern about not offending anybody

that reduces the interest level as well as the reality level of what

is in the textbooks.

Major publishers today tell their writers that they must be careful about using words like ‘‘American,’’ because if you say ‘‘American foreign policy,’’ you are referring to the foreign policy of all of

Latin America, South America, and North America, and no such

policy exists. So you must be careful of this word, because it suggests, quote, ‘‘geographical chauvinism.’’

They advise writers not to use the word ‘‘brotherhood.’’ The word

‘‘brotherhood’’ is almost universally banned because it is sexist.

Several publishers have banned the term ‘‘Middle East.’’ They suggest that it be replaced by ‘‘Southwest Asia.’’ How are students to

make sense of headlines that refer to the crisis in the Middle East

when all they know is about ‘‘Southwest Asia’’? Of course, what is

Southwest Asia south and west of—but that is another question.

Another term that is banned is ‘‘Orient.’’ Other terms that are

banned are ‘‘manpower’’ and ‘‘primitive’’ and ‘‘congressman,’’ heaven forbid.

The pressure groups that demand censorship of textbooks and

test passages do not come from one end of the political spectrum.

They are right wing, left wing, and every other kind of wing. Anyone with a strong objection is likely to get a passage deleted or a

story dropped if they object loudly enough and long enough.

It is not my intention today to blame the textbook publishers or

the testing agencies as the primary culprits. They do not want to

produce a bad product. They want to sell books and tests. To do
12

so, they must avoid controversy. They cannot afford to have some

group of people, even if it is only a handful, picketing at the State

textbooks hearings and stigmatizing their product as racist or sexist or dangerous or extremist. They may not like to have to censor

their products, but they have to do it to sell them.

By now, the publishers are so used to excluding stories in which

women are nurturing mothers and deleting photographs of poverty

in the Third World that they just assume that there is no other

way to publish a textbook. This reign of censorship and sensitivity

is now the way things are done.

The root cause of this censorship is the current situation in

which a score of States screen, select, and buy textbooks for the entire State. The two most important States in this regard, because

of their size, are California and Texas. Because of the power of

these two States, the entire textbook publishing industry is a

warped market. Instead of a marketplace with millions of consumers, the market is dominated by the decisions of these two States.

The consequence of this situation is twofold. First, it has provided a convenient bottleneck where pressure groups from across

the spectrum, whether representing feminist, anti-evolutionist, or

some other assertive groups, can intimidate publishers and get

them to revise their books. To avoid tangling with these groups,

publishers have rewritten their textbooks and now routinely censor

out what they know will be objectionable to almost anyone.

Second, the very expensive, high-stakes nature of the State adoption process has accelerated the consolidation of the textbook industry. A generation ago, there were many, many American textbook publishing companies. In recent years, small publishers have

gone bankrupt or merged with mega-corporations, leaving only four

or five big publishing houses dominating a $4 billion industry.

When one corporation owns half a dozen different publishing

companies, it does not have much incentive to keep several different competing textbooks in print. In effect, the textbook adoption

process has diminished competition.

I would go further and say that the loss of competition has also

resulted in a loss of quality. Teachers say the same thing. I hear

it from them frequently. The books are huge, stuffed with gorgeous

graphics, dazzling to look at, but they are dull, dull, dull.

I do blame the States. The States should abolish the textbook

adoption process. They should not choose the textbooks that the

State will pay for. To me, this is akin to saying that the Government will give away free tickets to certain movies, will pay for certain newspapers, and will allow you to watch certain approved TV

programs, but anyone who wants to see or read something different

has to pay for it themselves. I think it is wrong.

The States should abolish this process and allocate the States’ resources for materials on a per-pupil basis.

I would like to commend to you today the new review of State

U.S. history standards by Dr. Sheldon Stern, which was released

this week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, of which I am a

trustee. I would also like to commend the legislation that was introduced by you, Senator Alexander, to sponsor teacher training

academies in history and other related activities.
13

I think that anything the Federal Government and State governments, as well as universities and private industry, can do to improve our teachers’ knowledge of history is a very welcome improvement.

Thank you indeed.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you, Dr. Ravitch.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Ravitch follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DIANE RAVITCH

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my name is Diane Ravitch. I am

a historian of education at New York University and have held the Brown Chair

in Education Policy at the Brookings Institution for the past ten years. I served as

Assistant Secretary for the Office of Education Research and Improvement from

1991–1993, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Since 1997,

I have served as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, to which

I was appointed by Secretary of Education Richard Riley.

I have written or edited many books about American education. My latest, ‘‘The

Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn,’’ was published a few months ago. It is a detailed, closely documented study of the way that

censorship has changed the content of textbooks in history and literature, as well

as the passages used on standardized tests.

I wrote this book because of what I learned while serving on the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees national testing in many subjects. I discovered that testing agencies, publishing companies, State education departments, and

the Federal Government routinely restrict the use of certain words, phrases, topics,

and images. The process for screening materials for tests and textbooks is called

‘‘bias and sensitivity review.’’

As a result of my study, I found that the censorship of words, phrases, topics, and

images is widespread throughout the educational publishing industry. Stories by

well-known authors have been rewritten or deleted from standardized tests and

from textbooks because a bias and sensitivity review committee objects to certain

topics or language.

No one can possibly object to the removal of material that expresses bias, but

what few people realize today is that the educational publishing industry is using

a new definition of bias and insensitivity that defies common usage. In many instances, words and topics that appear in the morning newspaper are routinely removed from tests and textbook stories. Many classic American novels and stories—

like Mark Twain’s ‘‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’’ or John Steinbeck’s

‘‘Grapes of Wrath’’—would have difficulty passing a bias and sensitivity review

board today.

The result of the bias and sensitivity review process is to dumb down educational

materials, to reduce the vocabulary that children encounter, and to withhold from

students a realistic portrayal of the world today.

Let me offer some examples:

As a member of NAGB, I saw test passages eliminated because they allegedly

were biased or insensitive. In one case, the bias committee objected to a story because it mentioned Mount Rushmore. The committee said that the Indian tribe that

lives in the vicinity of that national monument considers the monument itself offensive; it recommended that the story should be dropped.

In another case, a true story about a blind young man who climbed Mt. McKinley

in an ice storm was eliminated. The bias committee said that students who had

never lived in the mountains couldn’t understand a story that was set in the mountains; that was considered regional bias. They also rejected the story because they

said it was demeaning to blind people to treat this young man as an inspiring hero;

blindness, they suggested, should not be treated as a handicap to be overcome.

Just this past summer, a bias review committee in New Jersey rejected a short

story by the famous African American writer Langston Hughes because he used the

words ‘‘Negro’’ and ‘‘colored person.’’ Sorry, but those are the words that were appropriate when he was writing. The same committee rejected a story by NPR’s Garrison

Keillor because it referred to a student whose mother had died of cancer. The committee decided that this comment—set in the middle of an autobiographical story—

was too frightening for 11th grade students to see.

Every mass-market publisher of textbooks and tests has compiled what they call

‘‘bias guidelines’’ or ‘‘sensitivity guidelines.’’ These guidelines describe the words,

topics, and images that they will not permit writers or illustrators to use. The test-
14

ing agencies are more restrictive than the textbook publishers, but all of them remove words and topics that some pressure group is like to object to.

In Appendix 1 of ‘‘The Language Police,’’ I compiled a list of over 500 words that

publishers have told writers and editors to avoid.

Major publishers, for example, tell writers to be careful about using the words

‘‘America’’ or ‘‘American’’ because they suggest ‘‘geographical chauvinism.’’ They also

advise writers not to use the word ‘‘brotherhood’’ because it is sexist. Several publishers ban the word ‘‘Orient.’’ And one must never use the words ‘‘manpower’’ or

‘‘primitive’’ or ‘‘Congressman.’’

One constant rule for writers and editors is that any word that begins or ends

with the three letters ‘‘man’’ or ‘‘-ess’’ is unacceptable. As a writer, I almost always

use gender-neutral words, but I hate the idea that a publisher can tell me that I

can never refer to mankind or an actress. That choice should be the writer’s. When

David Brinkley died recently, the New York Times ran a tribute to him called

‘‘David Brinkley, Anchorman,’’ but that headline could not be printed in a textbook.

When the Academy Awards offers Oscars for Best Actress, as they do every year,

they are violating the rules of the textbook industry.

When a bias committee encounters words like these, they change them or delete

them, regardless of the purposes of the author. Textbook publishers and testing

agencies fault classic literature because writers of earlier centuries used words that

are today considered objectionable. The president of a major testing company told

the assessment development committee of NAGB that ‘‘Everything written before

1970 was either racially biased or gender biased.’’

The pressure groups that demand censorship of textbooks and test passages do

not come from one end of the political spectrum. They are rightwing, leftwing, and

every other kind of wing. Anyone with a strong objection is likely to get a passage

deleted or a story dropped if they object loud enough and long enough.

The story gets worse when you consider the topics that are routinely banished

from tests and frequently removed from textbooks as well. The test contractor who

was preparing the voluntary national test in reading gave our NAGB committee a

package of guidelines that told us which topics are unacceptable. Here are a few

of them: Scary creatures like rats, mice, snakes, and roaches; disease; evolution; expensive consumer goods; magic and witchcraft; personal appearance, such as height

and weight; politics; slavery; racial prejudice; fables; Halloween; religion; social

problems; violence; someone losing their job; catastrophes like earthquakes and

fires; poverty; or any references to junk food.

The rationale for excluding so many topics—and this is just a sampling—is that

unpleasant topics might upset children, and they won’t be able to do their best on

the test. But, in the absence of any research to demonstrate the need to banish so

many topics, the likelier explanation is that these issues upset grown-ups. There are

various groups that consider these topics highly controversial, and they don’t want

children to be exposed to them. As I show in ‘‘The Language Police,’’ small groups

from very conservative religious backgrounds have objected to any mention of evolution, fossils, dinosaurs, witches, fantasy, or disobedient children in textbooks or

tests. They have successfully intimidated publishers and State testing agencies to

comply with their wishes.

The Harry Potter books are the most popular books in the United States. But they

are also the most banned books in the U.S. because they prominently feature witches, witchcraft, fantasy, disobedient children, and a dysfunctional family. These are

themes that publishers avoid. For that matter, a trio of witches appears in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and there is quite a long tradition of fantasy, witches, disobedient

children and other forbidden themes in fairy tales and lots of other classic literature.

Yet because of the objections of people who hold strong religious and political

views, stories that contain these topics are routinely screened out of textbooks to

protect our nation’s children. Are they protected? Of course not. They watch television and movies, where they see far worse things than witches and dinosaurs. The

net result of this regime of censorship is simply to make the textbooks and tests

banal and boring, thus reducing the possibility for getting children excited about

what they read.

Now, it is not my intention to blame the textbook publishers or testing agencies

as the primary culprits. They don’t want a bad product. They want to sell books

and tests. To do so, they must avoid controversy. They cannot afford to have some

group of people picketing at the State textbook hearing and stigmatizing their product as racist, sexist, dangerous, or extremist. They may not like to censor their

books, but they have to do it to sell their books in States that have a State adoption

process. By now, the publishers are so used to excluding stories in which women

are nurturing mothers and deleting photographs of poverty that they just assume
15

that there is no other way to publish a textbook. This reign of censorship and sensitivity is now the way things are done.

The root cause of the censorship that I describe is the current situation in which

a score of States screen, select, and buy textbooks for the entire State. The two most

important States in this regard, because of the size of their student enrollment, are

California and Texas. These two States enroll about 20 percent of the nation’s student population. They call the tune, and the publishers dance.

Because of the power of these two States, the entire textbook publishing industry

is a warped market. Instead of a marketplace with millions of consumers, the market is dominated by the decisions of these two States.

For a textbook publisher even to compete in California or Texas, they must invest

millions of dollars upfront in a speculative product. If they don’t win a contract, they

may go under.

The problem with this situation is two-fold.

First, it has provided a convenient bottleneck where pressure groups from across

the political spectrum—whether representing feminists, anti-evolutionists, or some

other assertive groups—can intimidate publishers and get them to revise their

books. To avoid tangling with these groups, publishers have rewritten their textbooks and now routinely censor out what they know will be objectionable to any of

these groups.

Second, the very expensive, high-stakes nature of the State adoption process has

accelerated the consolidation of the textbook industry. A generation ago, there were

numerous American textbook publishing companies. In recent years, small publishers have gone bankrupt or merged with megacorporations, leaving only four or five

big publishing houses dominating a $4 billion industry. When one corporation owns

half a dozen different publishing companies, it doesn’t have much incentive to keep

several different textbooks in print, competing with one another. In effect, the textbook adoption process—whereby the State buys texts for all schools in certain

grades—has diminished competition.

I would go further and say that the loss of competition among textbook publishers

has also resulted in a loss of quality. Teachers say the same thing. I hear it from

them frequently. The books are huge, stuffed with glitzy graphics, dazzling to look

at, but dull, dull, dull. The history books are comprehensive, but dull, dull, dull.

They are written by committee, edited by committee, choppy, superficial, and careful

to offend no one. Let me say again that I don’t blame the publishers. They are operating in the only marketplace that they know. Of course they prefer to make a sale

to the State of Texas or California rather than selling to millions of teachers. It is

easier for them, and it allows them to say that they are just complying with the

States’ standards by removing certain words, phrases, topics, and images. Frankly,

I wish the publishers would defend the First Amendment by calling attention to any

restriction on their freedom to publish. It is not good enough, I think, to defend the

restrictions by saying that they are just responding to the wishes of the marketplace.

I do blame the States, however. They should abolish the textbook adoption process. They should not choose the textbooks that the State will pay for. To me, this

is akin to saying that the Government will give away free tickets to certain movies,

and anyone who wants to see something different must pay for it themselves.

Instead they should abolish the State textbook adoption process and allocate the

State’s resources for educational materials on a per-pupil basis. Schools and teachers should use that money to buy the books or software or whatever they think

works best for them. The States set the standards, but they should leave the schools

and teachers free to meet them as they think best.

On the subject of State standards, I respectfully commend to the committee’s attention a brand new study of State U.S. history standards, off the presses today,

written by Dr. Sheldon Stern, who served for many years as the historian of the

John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Dr. Stern evaluated the standards of the 48

States that have them, plus the District of Columbia, on their handling of U.S. history—the first time this has ever been done by a historian. He found that six

States—Indiana, New York, Alabama, Arizona, California and Massachusetts—have

established outstanding academic standards for U.S. history, but that eight have

weak standards in this key subject; fully 23 States have U.S. history standards that

Dr. Stern terms ‘‘ineffective’’. Considering the central role that statewide academic

standards play in determining what our teachers teach and what our children learn,

this bleak picture deserves your attention. Dr. Stern’s study was prepared under the

aegis of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, of which I am a trustee.

Later this year the Fordham Institute will release a new study under my direction, which evaluates textbooks in U.S. history and world history. A dozen prominent historians cooperated in preparing this study.
16

I testified earlier this year on behalf of the legislation prepared by Senator Lamar

Alexander to sponsor teacher training academies in history and other valuable activities. Anything that the Federal and State Governments, as well as universities

and industry, can do to improve the knowledge of our teachers is a welcome improvement.

Education is a complicated, multi-faceted activity. It has many moving parts. We

certainly need well-prepared teachers. We also need excellent textbooks, tests, and

standards. As I tried to show in my book, ‘‘The Language Police,’’ and as Dr. Sheldon Stern shows in his review of State history standards, we do not have them now.

Thank you for your attention.

Senator ALEXANDER. Mr. Sewall?

Mr. SEWALL. My name is Gilbert Sewall, and I am pleased to be

here today.

I think that what we are looking at today is a matter of extreme

importance educationally.

For 14 years, I have been the director of the American Textbook

Council, an independent, New York-based educational organization

that reviews history textbooks and social studies curricula. The

American Textbook Council is dedicated to improve instructional

materials and civic education nationwide.

Since 1989, the Council has identified many problems with history textbooks. In American Textbook Council reports and in persuasive books such as Sandra Stotsky’s ‘‘Losing our Language’’ and

Diane Ravitch’s ‘‘The Language Police,’’ textbook critics reached the

same conclusions—textbook content is thinner and thinner, and

what there is is increasingly deformed by identity politics and pressure groups.

The first history textbook problem is what educators, critics and

journalists informally refer to as ‘‘dumbing down.’’ Many history

textbooks reflect lower sights for general education. They raise

basic questions about sustaining literacy and civic understanding

in a democratic polity and culture. Bright photographs, broken format, and seductive color overwhelm the text and confuse the page.

Typeface is larger and looser, resulting in many fewer words and

much more white space. The text disappears or gets lost. Among

editors, phrases such as ‘‘text-heavy,’’ ‘‘information-loaded,’’ ‘‘factbased,’’ and ‘‘nonvisual’’ are negatives. A picture, they insist, tells

a thousand words.

This declining textbook quality is neither a left nor right issue.

Publishers are adjusting to short attention spans and nonreaders.

Too many children cannot or do not want to read history, which

contains concrete facts and complicated concepts, reading that requires some facility with language. So textbooks become picture

and activity books instead.

The second history textbook problem—increasing content bias

and distortion—involves political judgments. The critique of distorted content in history is of course a problematic one. One person’s distortion is another’s correction. Yet the list of textbook activists grows. It spans gender, ethnic, religious, environmental and

nutrition causes that want to use textbooks to advance their agendas. The defenders of the revised history textbooks claim that textbooks used to be racist, sexist, ethnocentric, and jingo; now, they

are not. This is a political half-truth, a spurious and calculated

claim, but it has been an effective one politically.

A large part of the problem rests with the textbook publishers.

The consolidation of educational publishing from a domain in which
17

many independent, competing companies created and sold textbooks has changed the field. Today, four defensive, revenue-driven,

multinational corporations—Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt

and McGraw-Hill—offer fewer and fewer standard textbooks for

States and teachers to choose from.

None of these publishing giants shows the least interest in innovation, change, or offering books that come closer to meeting the

wishes of textbook critics and State-level curriculum reformers. Instead, publishers cater to pressure groups, for whom history textbook content is an extension of a broader political or cultural cause.

They make books whose content is meant to suit the sensitivities

of groups and causes more interested in self-promotion than in historical fact, scholarly appraisal, or balance. They are, more likely

than not, listening to the wrong voices.

The collaboration of educational publishers with pressure groups

and textbook censors is disturbing. Determining what history children will learn, who will be heroes and villains, what themes will

dominate, and what messages will be sent are crucial subtexts in

civic education. At worst, biased instructional materials are undermining students’ appreciation for America and citizenship.

In American history, establishment of responsible government,

development of a national economy, extension of democracy to

blacks and women, influence in world affairs, a rising standard of

living for most if not all, seems the main casualty of the multicultural idea.

Massachusetts, Virginia, and California have all produced strong

history standards. Still, a gulf exists between these State standards

and textbook content. California adopts textbooks through a Statelevel process. The most recent history adoptions in California,

1999, and Texas, 2002, indicate that these two key States are no

longer really selective about the history textbooks that they

adopt—nor can they be given the problem of four mega-publishers

that exert iron control over the market.

Publishers claim that they are only responding to State pressure

and State standards. They say the State adoption process is already an open public process. In fact, textbooks that States adopt

may conform minimally and mechanically to State standards. State

and local textbook adoption procedures rarely, if ever, address matters of style and textual quality. The main point of State review as

far as I can discern is to comply with detailed guidelines for representation and to give pressure groups a chance to vent and bully.

Publishers should be producing cheaper books that are more

text-centered, simpler in design and more honest in content. They

are failing to do so.

Meanwhile, a growing number of concerned educators and parents of all political stripes are asking for history textbooks that are

easy to ready and understand, that tell a story, that are compact,

legible and accurate, that do not ‘‘jump around.’’ They want history

textbooks free of the political pressure groups willing to corrupt

schoolbook history in order to advance their single interest. The

four giants in educational publishing are ignoring these commendable efforts in order to maximize their revenues.

Thank you.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you very much.
18

[The prepared statement of Mr. Sewall follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF GILBERT SEWALL

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, my experience with history textbooks and publishing goes back some 25 years. In 1978, I was the co-author of an

American history textbook, After Hiroshima: The U.S.A. since 1945. For 14 years,

I have been director of the American Textbook Council, an independent New Yorkbased educational organization that reviews history textbooks and social studies

curricula. It is dedicated to improving instructional materials and civic education

nationwide.

Since 1989, the Council has identified many problems with history textbooks. In

American Textbook Council reports and in persuasive books such as Sandra

Stotsky’s Losing Our Language and Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police, textbook

critics reach the same conclusions. Textbook content is thinner and thinner, and

what there is, is increasingly deformed by identity politics and pressure groups.

The first history textbook problem is what educators, critics and journalists informally refer to as ‘‘dumbing down.’’ Many history textbooks reflect lowered sights for

general education. They raise basic questions about sustaining literacy and civic understanding in a democratic polity and culture. Bright photographs, broken format

and seductive color overwhelm the text and confuse the page. Typeface is larger and

looser, resulting in many fewer words and much more white space. The text disappears or gets lost. Among editors, phrases such as ‘‘text-heavy,’’ ‘‘information-loaded,’’ ‘‘fact-based,’’ and ‘‘non-visual’’ are negatives. A picture, they insist, tells a thousand words.

This declining textbook quality is neither a right nor a left issue. Publishers are

adjusting to short attention spans and non-readers. Too many children cannot or do

not want to read history, which contains concrete facts and complicated concepts,

reading that requires some facility with language. So textbooks become picture and

activity books instead.

The second history textbook problem—increasing content bias and distortion—involves political judgments. The critique of distorted content in history is, of course,

a problematic one. One person’s distortion is another’s correction. Yet the list of

textbook activists grows. It spans gender, ethnic, religious, environmental and nutrition causes that want to use textbooks to advance their agendas. New heroes in

leading textbooks—Mansa Masu, Anne Hutchinson, Rigoberta Menchu, Chico

Mendez, and Anita Hill—are designed to advance a political agenda that highlights

and ennobles people of color, peace advocates, anti-colonialists, environmentalists,

and wronged women. One-time historical giants like Julius Caesar and Marcus

Aurelius, Copernicus and Magellan, George Washington and Napoleon, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill play supporting

roles.

The defenders of the revised history textbooks claim that textbooks used to be racist, sexist, ethnocentric, and jingoistic, and now they’re not. This is a political halftruth, a spurious and calculated claim, but it has been an effective one.

A large part of the problem rests with the textbook publishers. The consolidation

of educational publishing from a domain where many independent, competing companies created and sold textbooks has changed the field. Today, four defensive, revenue-driven multinational corporations—Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt and

McGraw-Hill—offer fewer and fewer standard textbooks for States and teachers to

choose from.

None of these publishing giants shows the least interest in innovation, change or

offering books that come closer to meeting the wishes of textbook critics and Statelevel curriculum reformers. Instead, publishers cater to pressure groups for whom

history textbook content is an extension of a broader political or cultural cause.

They make books whose content is meant to suit the sensitivities of groups and

causes more interested in self-promotion than in historical fact, scholarly appraisal,

or balance. They are, more likely than not, listening to the wrong voices.

Unlike in the college textbook market, where authors write their own books and

market shares for each textbook are small, ‘‘el-hi’’ history textbook authors have

such minimal control over their product that authorship is to be doubted. The big

names become involved—i.e., lend their names to the enterprise—for the money.

Publishers have shrunk their editorial and production staffs, moving toward a writing-for-hire production system and abandoning the royalty-based author system.

Some new secondary-level history textbooks have no authors at all. Authors have

been replaced by a long list of contributors, censors, and special pleaders, concerned

first of all that history meets the standards of multiculturalism.
19

When multiculturalism promised a reformed social studies curriculum of ‘‘inclusion’’ in the 1980s and early 1990s, its almost universal appeal lay in its pledge to

broaden the nation’s understanding of minorities and ordinary people who had been

unduly ignored by ‘‘presidential’’ and ‘‘elitist’’ history. Thus multiculturalism calls

for a reformed history of new voices with a distinct political subtext. The American

epic is transformed into a fight and triumph over white, elite, patriarchal, ‘‘European’’ oppression. From the age of exploration to the present day a slanted, antitraditionalist, shaming story of oppression runs as a thematic thread.

National history standards developed in 1993 and 1994 provided outlines and thematic cues for social studies publishers involved in textbook content revision. These

standards ratified historical content and themes that social studies editors had been

incorporating into textbooks for longer than a decade, changes often being made

under activist pressure. But content makeovers had occurred unbeknownst to most

people except textbook publishers, curriculum specialists, and political activists,

which is the main reason they were greeted with such public alarm and condemnation in the Senate in 1995. The historian Gordon S. Wood of Brown University said

of these history disputes: ‘‘So what might seem to be a petty academic debate about

the nature of historical writing in fact has momentous implications for the kind of

nation that we Americans want to be.’’

The collaboration of educational publishers with pressure groups and textbook

censors is disturbing. Determining what history children will learn, who will be heroes and villains, what themes will dominate, and what message will be sent are

crucial subtexts in civic education. At worst, biased instructional materials are undermining students’ appreciation for America and citizenship. In American history—

establishment of responsible government, development of a national economy, extension of democracy to blacks and women, influence in world affairs, a rising standard

of living for most if not all—seems the main casualty of the multicultural idea.

Massachusetts, Virginia and California have all produced strong history standards. Still, a gulf exists between State standards and textbook content. California

adopts textbooks through a State-level process. The most recent history adoptions

in California (1999) and Texas (2002) indicate that these two key States are no

longer really selective about the history textbooks that they adopt. Nor can they be,

given the problem of four mega-publishers that exert iron control over the market.

Publishers claim that they are only responding to State pressure and State standards. They say the State adoption process is already an open, public process. In fact,

textbooks that States adopt may conform minimally and mechanically to State

standards. State and local textbook adoption procedures rarely, if ever, address matters of style and textual quality. The main point of State review, as far as I can

discern, is to comply with detailed guidelines for representation and to give pressure

groups a chance to vent and bully.

Publishers should be producing cheaper books that are more text-centered, simpler in design, and more honest in content. They are failing to do so.

Meanwhile, a growing number of concerned educators and parents of all political

stripes are asking for history textbooks that are easy-to-read and understand, that

tell a story, that are compact, legible and accurate, that do not ‘‘jump around.’’ They

want history textbooks free of the political pressure groups willing to corrupt schoolbook history in order to advance their single interest. The four giants in education

publishing are ignoring these commendable efforts in order to maximize revenues.

Thank you.

Ms. STOTSKY. Thank you very much for the privilege of being

here.

I am speaking today first as an administrator in the Massachusetts Department of Education, responsible for the development of

all of our basic standards in the past several years, revisions of

earlier documents. I am also speaking as an educational researcher

for many, many years and am familiar with contents of reading

programs, curricular materials in all subject areas, and materials

that are used for professional development across the curriculum,

about which I will have some specific remarks toward the end of

my remarks here.

I am here to suggest that an understanding of our basic political

principles and our civic identity as a people are at stake in the conflicts taking place today over State history standards and textbooks. Academically sound and strong history standards will not
20

completely solve the problem of how to strengthen the study of history in K–12 and promote civically meaningful student achievement, but they will help a great deal.

Today, for example, the traditional U.S. history course, with its

in-depth study of the Founding and the Framers, has almost disappeared under the weight of ‘‘multiple perspectives.’’ It has become, a course in social, not political, history. The result is uninformed civic participation, if any at all.

Today, many educators from my experience in Massachusetts,

seek to use study of U.S. and world history to create hostility to

the U.S. in particular, to Western values in general, and to eliminate a national identity for Americans. They want Americans to

see themselves as global or world citizens, with a cross-national racial, ethnic, or gender identity as their primary identity. I enclose

a recent resolution by the Boston City Council as evidence for this

statement.

In Massachusetts, history standards were mandated in the Education Reform Act of 1993. After 3 years of battles, the first standards were approved in 1997. At that time, the main content charge

by critics was that it was ‘‘eurocentric.’’ The Boston Globe praised

it for precisely that reason.

In 2001, we began to revise it, and I was now the administrator

in the department responsible for that revision. The revision was

mandated by law and was also needed because of various flaws in

the 1997 document. The flaw was not because it was eurocentric

in orientation; there were other problems with the standards.

We tried to correct all of the flaws that we saw, and we all felt

that the new 2002 document, which I have a copy of here, addresses all those limitations. It was fully supported by the commissioner,

the board of education, the Governor’s office, and key legislators.

It had broad bipartisan support in Massachusetts. We were very

happy about that.

Unlike most other States’ documents, it provides teachers with

only one set of content standards to address at each grade level,

together with related concepts and skills, and addresses the basic

subjects of the history and social science curriculum—economics,

geography, and civics or government.

To unify this document across the grades and across both U.S.

and world history, the document suggests a few overarching

themes on the origins and development of democratic principles,

democratic institutions, and individual freedoms. It is not a politically correct document. Its standards provide the basis for an honest curriculum about the U.S. and the rest of the world.

During the process and before the vote on the document, there

were many critics and many charges and many attempts to undo

or redo certain aspects of the document. One of the major charges

was a concern about the nature of the early standards having a

strong emphasis on children’s identity as American citizens. Some

critics felt that this was going to be ‘‘offensive’’ to some children—

that was a word that was used.

There were other little anecdotes that would give you some clues

about the problems with even the geography curriculum. We had

a battle over where Mexico is. I finally had to have someone call

the Mexican Embassy to ask where the Mexicans think Mexico is.
21

It was not in Latin America. They did not want American children

to see it in Middle America, Central America, or Latin America.

North America is what we were told by the vice consul.

We had a problem about where Afghanistan was after 9/11. Some

members of the committee wanted to take it out of the Central

Asian republics and put it in the Middle East. We said no—it was

going to stay where it had been for thousands of years—one of the

Central Asian republics.

So these were minor little skirmishes along the way to getting

these standards. Critics came out with larger kinds of concerns.

They were very unhappy about the omission of anthropology, sociology, and psychology in the document, which was revising an old

quarrel between social studies and history educators. They did not

like our overarching themes because they did not like the current

themes on the evolution of democratic principles and personal freedoms but could not quite say that directly. They charged the document as being too prescriptive, too many facts, too many standards,

promoting ‘‘drill kill,’’ rote memorization, leaving little room for creative teaching—the usual way to dismiss a document. They complained there were not enough standards on Africa, Asia, and

South America before the 15th century. They found the document

too Eurocentric and proposed instead and provided details for an

‘‘Islamocentric’’ curriculum—and I have copies of that as well. They

perceived the standards we did have on Islam as biased if not racist, because they addressed problematic as well as positive aspects

of Islamic civilization.

The critics did not succeed in getting basic changes and did not

delay the vote. There is a question of how soon the document’s

standards can serve as a basis for assessment, and one of the chief

critics who was at that time head of the superintendents’ association keeps threatening to come up with an alternative set of standards and literally keeps trying to discourage the schools from implementing our standards.

The standards are very important to have, but I say that they

will not address the whole problem because we have teachers who

would like to address the new standards but do not have adequate

materials to use. Many of course lack adequate knowledge of U.S.

and world history themselves and are at the mercy of grossly misleading curricular materials, if not simply inadequate.

But in my judgment, the most serious problem we face with respect to the curricular materials does not stem from the textbooks

produced by mainstream educational publishers but from the materials and consultants provided by professional development centers

in our schools of education and by nonprofit organizations for use

in the endless stream of professional development workshops that

teachers are mandated to take. These centers and nonprofits tend

to be ideologically driven, often have personal contacts with school

personnel that are stronger than mainstream educational publishers have, and they tend to bypass public scrutiny altogether—the

scrutiny that textbooks receive.

One Massachusetts organization, a nationally active one, is promoting in its workshops and curricular materials for professional

development a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and the

U.S. in materials on the American eugenics movement, implying
22

that the U.S. is responsible not only for Hitler’s racial policies but

ultimately for the Holocaust. Another is promoting reparations for

slavery in its materials.

These organizations and centers are regular partners in proposals with school districts for State and Federal grants.

The other problem is that our undergraduate history departments which produce the prospective history teacher do not tend to

teach much political or intellectual history to prospective history

teachers these days or, as I am told by many historians, they do

not tend to hire professors with specialties in U.S. political history.

Therefore, we end up with teachers who now need this endless

stream of professional development because they have not had the

adequate background in their undergraduate years and have inadequate text materials to deal with.

Academically sound materials matter because they guide academically honest and conscientious teachers and Statewide assessments. They will guide publishers of curricular materials and textbooks in States where there is accountability. They also serve, as

they do in Massachusetts, as the basis for licensing regulations and

tests for prospective history and government teachers. This is a

very important area, because there is the basis for examining what

the prospective teacher brings to the classroom. And they can serve

as the basis—and this is a recommendation I am making—for judging the quality of undergraduate history and political science

courses in institutions that prepare prospective teachers if Federal

funding is tired to high cut scores on teacher tests in history and

government or on college exit exams that reflect the academic and

civic content of good history and civics standards for K–12. Thank

you very much.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you, Ms. Stotsky.

[The prepared statement of Ms. Stotsky follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SANDRA STOTSKY

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, I am here today to suggest that

an understanding of our basic political principles and our civic identity as a people

are at stake in the conflicts taking place today over State history standards and history textbooks or other curriculum materials. Academically sound and strong history

standards will not completely solve the problem of how to strengthen the study of

history in K–12 and promote civically meaningful student achievement. But they

will help a great deal. I speak as the administrator in the Massachusetts Department of Education responsible for the development of the 2002 Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework. I also speak as an active participant in local community life. I served as an elected trustee of my public library for

14 years and as an elected Town Meeting Member for 10 years. I also served as

president of my local chapter of the League of Women Voters. I fully understand

the need for informed civic participation and community service to make self-government meaningful.

Civic education has typically taken place through the history curriculum in units

on local and State history in the early grades, a 1-year course on U.S. history usually in grade 11, and a middle school course in State and Federal Government. Over

the past 100 years, however, there has been a steady decline in the teaching of history through the grades. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the social studies—a mix of history, political science, geography, civics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and current events—emerged and steadily gained ascendance. As

a school subject, it has always had participatory goals, but it has always been academically erratic in approach because it lacks a clear disciplinary framework. And

the results speak for themselves.

Today the traditional U.S. history course, with its in-depth study of the Founding

and the Framers, has almost disappeared under the weight of ‘‘multiple perspec-
23

tives.’’ It has become a course in social not political history, leaving teachers little

time to help students understand the historical and philosophical basis for, as well

as contemporary applications of, our political principles and procedures. The result

is uninformed civic participation, if any at all. Although some of the ignorance may

be dispelled by a grade 12 course in U.S. Government, only 17 percent of the high

schools in Massachusetts, for example, require such a course for graduation.

It is not easy today for States to develop academically sound and civically responsible history standards. Many educators (and others) seek to use study of U.S. and

world history to create hostility to the U.S. in particular, and to Western values in

general, and to eliminate a national identity for Americans. They want Americans

to see themselves as ‘‘global’’ or ‘‘world’’ citizens, with a cross-national racial, ethnic,

or gender identity as their primary identity. (e.g., see the attachment: A recent Resolution by the Boston City Council on how Columbus Day is to be celebrated in the

future.) No help is available from national standards because those produced by the

National Council for the Social Studies and the National Center for History in the

Schools at UCLA were and remain ideologically biased, causing State-by-State battles over State standards.

In Massachusetts, statewide history standards were mandated in the Education

Reform Act of 1993–1994. After a 3-year series of battles, the first set of standards

was approved in 1997 by the Board of Education. At that time, critics charged it

with being ‘‘Eurocentric,’’ but the Boston Globe praised it for precisely that reason.

The Department of Education began revision of the 1997 document in 2001. Revision was mandated by law and was badly needed because of major problems with

the 1997 curriculum framework, but not because of its ‘‘Eurocentric’’ orientation.

To begin with, the 1997 document lacked specific grade by grade content standards. What it did offer as standards were four separate sets of statements for the

study of history, geography, economics, and civics/government for 4-year grade

spans. These statements were chiefly expressions of broad intellectual processes or

academic goals. Although the document contained excellent lists of core topics and

commonly taught subtopics for U.S. and world history, these topics were not written

in the form of standards nor arranged developmentally. Nor did the document require a list of seminal documents taught to all students. Its fundamental flaw was

that the standards it provided for the grade 10 test required for graduation were

in world, not U.S., history.

The 2002 curriculum framework addresses all the limitations of the 1997 document and is fully supported by the Commissioner of Education, the Board of Education, the Governor’s Office, and some key legislators—i.e., broad bipartisan support. At most grade levels, recognized historical periods in U.S. or world history

serve to organize history standards reflecting the core topics of the 1997 document

but integrating the relevant content of geography, civics, and economics. Thus, unlike most other States’ documents, this document provides teachers with only one

set of content standards to address at each grade level, together with related concepts and skills. At the high school level, the document provides standards for two

continuous years of study of U.S. history. These standards are to serve as the basis

for the test required for graduation. To unify study across the grades and across

both U.S. and world history, the document suggests a few overarching themes on

the origins and development of democratic principles, democratic institutions, and

individual freedoms. This is not a politically correct document. Its standards provide

the basis for an honest curriculum about the U.S. and the rest of the world.

The U.S. history standards: (1) emphasize American history, geography, and who

we are as a people in the early grades; (2) present a balanced view of the Puritans

and the development of our educational, political, and economic institutions in the

Colonial period; (3) offer strong standards on the Framers and the Founding and

on our political principles and institutions, their origins and evolution, in grades 3–

5 and high school; (4) stress the Founding as politically revolutionary, not as a reflection of the thinking of slave-owning sexists; (5) require reading of a variety of

seminal U.S. political documents in high school; and (6) expect students to understand the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-religious nature of the people of the

U.S., with particular reference to the history of African Americans.

The world history standards: (1) clarify the roots of Western Civilization (a moral

code stressing individual worth and personal responsibility, and the origins of democratic institutions and principles); (2) address the presence, nature, and history of

slavery in non-Western as well as Western cultures; (3) address enough British and

European history to ensure coverage of the history of democratic institutions/principles there and in the U.S.; (4) provide for systematic learning of world geography;

(5) expand coverage of Islamic history because of Islam’s role in shaping African and

Indian/Southeast Asian history and the problems in Muslim-dominant countries

today; (6) limit coverage of early Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Indian history, as
24

well as native cultures in the Western hemisphere and in Africa, to avoid a milewide, inch-deep curriculum and to address teachers’ criticisms of the 1997 document; and (7) eliminate comparative study of world religions in the elementary and

middle grades because of age-inappropriateness for meaningful comparisons.

Before the vote on the document, the critics—chiefly social studies or multicultural educators—set out a number of complaints. (1) They quarreled with the omission of anthropology, sociology, and psychology, and a lack of encouragement of political activism—reviving the old quarrel between social studies and history educators. (2) They claimed the document lacks ‘‘overarching’’ themes because they

don’t like the current overarching themes on the evolution of democratic principles

and personal freedoms. (3) They charged that the document is too ‘‘prescriptive,’’ has

too many facts and too many standards for each grade, promotes drill and kill and

rote memorization, and leaves little room for ‘‘creative’’ teaching. (4) They complained there aren’t enough standards on Native Indians and on Africa, Asia, and

South America before the 15th century. (5) They found the document too

Eurocentric and proposed, instead, and provided details for, an Islamocentric curriculum. And (6) they perceived the standards on Islam as ‘‘biased’’ if not ‘‘racist’’

because they addressed problematic as well as positive aspects of Islamic civilization

(such as asking students to learn about the trans-African slave trade to the Middle

East and to explain why Islamic societies failed ‘‘to keep pace’’ with Europe after

1500).

Who were the critics? The chief critics were (1) a superintendent who at the time

was head of the Massachusetts superintendents’ association and was once head of

‘‘Educators for Social Responsibility’’ and (2) a network of educators and politicians

spanning Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Boston University’s African

Studies Center, an organization called Primary Source providing consultants and

curriculum materials to the schools, and the Boston City Council.

These critics have used a variety of strategies, first to try to delay the vote on

the standards, then, after the vote, to try to distort the State assessments to be

based on them and to delay implementation of the standards by the schools. In the

final stage of preparing the document for a vote, the head of the superintendents’

association sent inaccurate information about the document to all the other superintendents in the State, asking for their signatures on a petition to send to the Department seeking delay and major revisions before Board approval. Both sets of critics requested non-public meetings with the chairman of the Board, the Commissioner, and/or Department staff to present the changes they wanted in the final

draft. Several critics communicated regularly with some Department of Education

staff (through telephone calls and requests for meetings) to get changes made—almost to the point of harassment. Almost no changes were made because the requests were outside of a public process, the suggestions were unsound or unacceptable, and most teachers/administrators did not want the vote delayed (and did not

support the critics).

After Board approval of the document, allies of the critics got themselves placed

on Assessment Committees responsible for developing future State tests in history.

They sought but failed to get someone in their camp in charge of these assessments

at the Department. They did help to get a delay to 2009 for the first statewide assessments to be based on the new standards on the grounds that teachers need all

that time to put new curricula in place. In addition, the superintendent who was

head of the superintendents’ association keeps threatening to come up with an alternative set of standards and keeps trying to discourage the schools from implementing the standards.

We face other problems in implementing these standards. Many schools do not

have enough money to buy new textbooks or other materials to address topics they

have not been teaching. Teachers who want to address the new standards have few

sound textbooks to use. Many lack adequate knowledge of U.S. and world history

themselves—and are at the mercy of inadequate or often grossly misleading curriculum materials. In my judgment, the most serious problems we face with respect to

curriculum materials in history, geography, and civics do not stem from the textbooks produced by mainstream educational publishers but from the curriculum materials and consultants provided by ‘‘professional development’’ centers in schools of

education and by non-profit organizations for use in the endless stream of professional development workshops teachers are mandated to take. These centers and

non-profits tend to be ideologically driven, often have better personal contacts with

school personnel than do mainstream educational publishers, and by-pass the public

scrutiny that textbooks may receive. They can easily politicize the entire curriculum

in the vacuum created by neutered textbooks. One Massachusetts-based but nationally active organization is promoting a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany

and the U.S. in its workshops and materials on the American eugenics movement,
25

implying that the U.S. is responsible for Hitler’s racial policies and, ultimately, the

Holocaust. The Massachusetts-based organization that is part of the network of critics is pushing reparations for slavery in its curriculum materials. Organizations and

centers like these are regular partners in proposals with school districts for State

and Federal grants.

The long delay before the first statewide tests in 2009 leaves many Massachusetts

schools with little motivation to address the new standards quickly, especially if

their K–12 coordinator or superintendent is opposed to them and hopes for political

changes in the State by then. Worse yet, undergraduate history departments do not

tend to teach much political or intellectual history to prospective history teachers

these days or hire professors with specialties in U.S. political history to teach it.

This major problem should be addressed in the Reauthorization of Higher Education

Act. Unfortunately, most parents, school boards, and other citizens do not know how

to use State standards in constructive ways to promote more academic curricula in

their own schools.

Academically sound and explicit history standards matter a great deal. They serve

as a guide to academically honest teachers and statewide assessments. They guide

publishers of curriculum materials and textbooks in States where the schools must

teach to the standards because there is accountability for student learning that is

tied to State tests based on the standards. They also serve (as they do in Massachusetts) as the basis for licensing regulations and tests for prospective history and government teachers. And they can serve as the basis for judging the quality of undergraduate history and political science courses in institutions that prepare prospective teachers if Federal funding is tied clearly to high cut scores on teacher tests

in history and government or on college exit tests that reflect their academic and

civic content. Thank you.

Resolution

Boston City Council

(2003)

Whereas, throughout its history the City of Boston has been a community of immigrants from places all over the globe who have been attracted to its economic opportunities, world-class cultural and educational institutions, and its openness to

new ideas and peoples; and

Whereas, the City of Boston has, in turn, benefited the global community

through the contributions of its multi-ethnic citizenry to democratic ideals and progressive innovations in science, theology, medicine, governance, human rights, the

arts, and numerous other fields; and

Whereas, the Boston Public Library, the oldest publicly supported municipal library in America, is inaugurating a new map exhibit entitled ‘‘Faces and Places’’

that celebrates the diversity of Boston’s citizenry and the development of the rich

texture of its neighborhood communities over the years; and

Whereas, The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, Boston’s newest library open to the general public, is inaugurating a new exhibit in its

world-famous Mapparium entitled ‘‘Words for the World’’ that features the voices of

children sharing their grandest ideas and hopes for the world; and

Whereas, it is entirely fitting and proper at this point in our history to recognize

the interconnectedness of our municipal community with the global community and

to honor specifically the unique role of ‘‘Boston in the world and the world in Boston;’’

Therefore, Be It

Resolved: That the Boston City Council, in meeting assembled, declares that October 11, 2003, and hereafter every Saturday of the Columbus Day weekend be

‘‘World Citizens Day’’ in the City of Boston and calls upon its citizens to participate

in such community activities as are appropriate to the occasion.

HOW STUDY OF THE HOLOCAUST IS TURNING AMERICA INTO AMERIKA

SANDRA STOTSKY

(To be published in Understanding Anti-Americanism: Origins, Symptoms,

and Consequences, Paul Hollander, Editor, Chicago: Ivan Dee, Spring 2004 (Not

to be cited or quoted from without permission))

About a decade ago, I gave an invited talk at a session of the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE). In it, I criticized a growing tendency by

English teachers and literature anthologies to use literature about the Holocaust for
26

1The publishers cited in this section were the major publishers of school anthologies during

the 1990s and their anthologies are likely still in use in the schools because of the costs in replacing them. Moreover, even if State law mandates new textbook adoptions every five years,

there are rarely drastic changes in content from one edition to another (every five years or so)

because of the cost of changing the contents of an entire anthology and because teachers have

favorite selections they want to continue teaching. However, there is no way to determine exactly what students read in these anthologies because teachers exercise their own idiosyncratic

choice in what they assign students in their own classrooms. Nor is it possible to obtain exact

sales figures from the publishers (or other sources), in a highly competitive and fragile market,

to determine how many of their anthologies were sold to the schools in any one period of time.

implying similarities between Nazi concentrations camps and the internment camps

for the Japanese Americans during World War II and ignoring differences. In the

question and answer period following my talk, several teachers in the audience expressed great concern about my remarks. They believed their students should see

‘‘the essential similarities’’ between Nazi concentration camps and the internment

camps for Japanese Americans and felt that any discussion of differences would be

‘‘a whitewash.’’

But shouldn’t students see a difference, I suggested, between an experience in

which people left a confinement alive and in good health and one in which they left

in the form of smoke and ashes? More important, I added, shouldn’t they consider

why there were differences and how our political principles and institutions might

account for them?

Showing some annoyance at my questions, these teachers professed that they did

not see the differences as significant. In addition, they encouraged their students

to see similarities between Nazi concentration camps and America’s ‘‘concentration

camps’’ for Native Americans, and between the European Holocaust and the ‘‘Holocaust’’ perpetrated by European explorers and settlers on these peoples through the

introduction of deadly contagious diseases.

These teachers had a particular moral point of view about Americans that they

wanted to inculcate in their students, and they clearly did not want their students’

judgments colored by any ambiguity. We have no way of knowing exactly how successful they and teachers like them have been. But many educators, especially in

the social studies, have made a mammoth effort in the past two decades to use

study of the Holocaust to make students think that their country’s history resembles

the history of the Nazis and that there is little difference between most white Americans and the Nazis. Most of them probably believe they are helping their students

understand the evils of racism and intolerance, but the ‘‘lessons’’ they have guided

students to extract from their study of the Holocaust may be one of the major

sources of anti-American attitudes in education.

This essay describes how literature about the Holocaust is being used in an increasing number of schools in this country—and more recently in Europe—to imply

a moral equivalence between Nazis and white Americans, and to cultivate a negative attitude toward white Americans, American citizenship, American history, and

American political institutions. Nothing could more effectively delegitimate American society than to encourage young students to believe that it can be compared

with Nazi Germany. Other features of current history curricula or history textbooks

contribute to this goal, such as an emphasis on the Framers of the Constitution as

slaveholders or the near absence of information on racism and slavery in non-Western civilizations, but none is as poisonous (or as profoundly ironic) as the effort to

use the literature about the Holocaust for this purpose. However, the efforts to do

so, both in this country and abroad, are not well-known to those outside of K–12,

and they are rapidly increasing in method and sponsorship. Indeed, the study of the

Holocaust has recently begun to be used with a new and diabolical twist—to encourage students to view the U.S. as ultimately responsible for the Holocaust.

Moral Equivalence in the English Class

Leading school literature anthologies published during the 1990s imply moral

equivalence in a variety of imaginative ways.1 Most often, the literary context for

a selection on the Holocaust is used for this purpose. For example, in its grade 8

anthology, Prentice Hall’s 1994 Literature pairs the play based on Anne Frank’s

diary with a play based on Virginia Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear. The latter

play centers on a mysterious old house in Ohio whose underground tunnels and

caves were used by its wealthy abolitionist owner over 100 years ago to help runaway slaves. The two plays are implicitly linked by the central importance of the

house in each play—in both cases a house that sheltered people needing protection

from racists who would destroy their freedom if not their lives. They are explicitly

linked by two pages entitled ‘‘Multicultural Connection.’’ These pages describe the

rise and fall of Adolph Hitler, explain the term ‘‘Holocaust,’’ and provide figures on
27

2 Although Wiesel is now an American citizen, it is not clear why his Acceptance Speech—

or any of his work—constitutes American literature. Selections from Night are contextualized

appropriately from a thematic perspective in the two grade 12 anthologies that feature them.

In one, the selection is placed under the thematic title of ‘‘The Twentieth Century: Searching

for Meaning’’ and among a group of works by well-known European authors. In the other, the

selection from Night appears with Wiesel’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech in a section titled

‘‘Facing Death’’ containing thematically related works from the Romantic and Victorian Periods,

1800–1900. The only problem with this placement is that all the works in this section are supposed to be from those periods.

the different kinds of people who died in Eastern Europe as a result of persecution.

What is of particular interest is that these pages do not make or invite any explicit

comparison between the Nazis and white slaveowners. The teaching apparatus for

each play simply informs students that it reflects the theme of ‘‘The Just and the

Unjust,’’ making it reasonable for students to infer that the counterpart to the unjust in Anne Frank’s story are the white racists who condoned or profited from slavery. The issue is not that they were unjust; the issue is that they were not Nazilike in their behavior.

As another example, the context for Anne Frank’s story in McDougal, Littell’s

1994 grade 8 anthology also uses a story about black Americans to link Nazi Germany to America. In a unit thematically titled ‘‘The Will to Survive,’’ the play is

offered by itself under the title ‘‘The Invincible Spirit’’ but is then followed by a

group of short pieces ranging widely in mood and topic under the title ‘‘Caught in

Circumstances’’. The first work in the group is a fictional story by Paulette

Childress White about the indignities suffered by a black family that is forced to

go on welfare because of the father’s loss of a job; the story is narrated by the 12-

year old daughter as she accompanies her mother to the welfare office. It is immediately followed by Langston Hughes’s poem, ‘‘The Dream Keeper,’’ a poem that suggests how harsh the real world is for anyone with dreams. It is unlikely that students will miss the implied connections to Anne Frank’s story.

It should be noted that the popularity of the play ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’ in

the secondary school curriculum long antedates the current moralism on intolerance. English teachers began to introduce the play or the diary itself (and sometimes Elie Wiesel’s semi-autobiographical Night) to secondary students decades ago

because these works are moving personal accounts of the Holocaust presented

through the eyes of sensitive adolescents. One can find the play based on Anne

Frank’s diary or an excerpt from it in the six leading literature anthologies for grade

8 (including the two described above), in one literature anthology for grade 6, and

in one instructional reader for grade 7 used in the 1990s. Night is also taught frequently in grades 9 through 12, to judge by the presence of excerpts from it in two

grade 12 anthologies and by individual trade book sales. Both these works continue

to deserve a place in school literature programs for literary and social reasons even

though students may no longer be asked to read them to gain an appreciation of

the strength of the human spirit in the face of evil.

Four grade 8 anthologies link the Holocaust to racism in America through an implicit comparison of Nazi concentration camps to the internment of the Japanese

Americans on the West Coast during World War II. Scott Foresman’s l991 anthology

does so in an ingenious manner. Although it groups ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’ with

an excerpt from a play about an elderly woman in France during the occupation who

pretends to be a collaborator of the Nazis in order to help their intended victims

(a laudable context because it helps to bring out the character of the Dutch family

who hid the Frank family), the last selection in the unit directly preceding the play

about Anne Frank is Yoshiko Uchida’s short story ‘‘The Bracelet.’’ This story is

about a young Japanese American girl’s loss of a bracelet given by a school friend

before her family is taken from their home by bayonet-armed soldiers to an internment camp with barbed wire strung around its grounds. The textual contiguity of

‘‘The Bracelet’’ and ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’ clearly suggests that the editors of

this anthology saw common elements and wanted to help students see them too.

Further, this editorial point of view is consistent across the textbooks in this series.

The grade 11 anthology in this series, which is devoted to American literature,

places Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech directly after selections by Lorraine Hansberry and Ralph Ellison, both understandably highlighting prejudice

against blacks in this country.2

Contiguity of selections, however, is not necessary for a link to be made between

the internment of the Japanese Americans and the Holocaust. All that is necessary

is the presence of information about the internment camps somewhere in the anthology. Two anthologies find novel ways to bring in this information. In an earlier

unit in the anthology, before ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’ appears, McDougal,

Littell’s 1994 anthology offers a letter written by William Tsuchida to his brother
28

3 A connection with discrimination against blacks and women is facilitated by the following

unit, which includes a journalist’s account, based on interviews with survivors, of what happened to Anne Frank, her family, and Dutch friends after they are discovered by the Gestapo.

This account is directly followed by an essay by Shirley Chisholm on the prejudice that blacks

and women have to overcome in this country. 4Page 114 in ‘‘Literature for all Students: A Sourcebook for Teachers,’’ a product of a California Literature Institute, published by the California State Department of Education in 1985.

and sister who were confined in an internment camp while he was serving in the

U.S. Army during World War II. The letter says nothing about the internment

camps, but the editors make use of the letter (which they put into the anthology

even though it is not a literary selection) to give students information about the internment camps. Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s 1993 anthology gives students the

information in a different way. It presents a short story by Yoshiko Uchida as the

introduction to its grade 8 anthology, and although the story is not about the internment experience but about a young Japanese woman on her way to America to

marry a Japanese man who had already immigrated to America and made his fortune here, the biographical description at the end of the story notes that Uchida ‘‘experienced firsthand the discrimination to which many Japanese Americans were

subjected during World War II,’’ adding that she spent ‘‘a year with her family in

a concentration camp for Japanese Americans in Topaz, Utah.’’ In Holt, Rinehart

and Winston’s 1997 anthology, the Uchida story and biographical information no

longer appear. But one follow-up activity (p. T 436) to ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’

suggests discussing Martin Luther King and civil rights, Eleanor Roosevelt and

women’s rights, and Mohandas Gandhi and non-violent protest, while another follow-up activity (p. T 443) suggests comparing Night or Ruth Minsky Sender’s The

Cage with Farewell to Manzanar, a poorly written autobiographical piece of whiteguilt literature about the experiences of a very young Japanese American girl in one

of the internment camps. The editors figured out how to imply similarities by noting

that ‘‘all three are autobiographies by people who were imprisoned during World

War II because of their religious or national background.’’

Prentice Hall’s 1994 anthology lays the groundwork for the link in yet another

way. It includes in a poetry unit directly following ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’ a letter in the form of a poem, conveying what a young girl might have written to a

friend in response to the executive order from the U.S. government requiring the

Japanese on the West Coast to report to Relocation Centers for internment. 3 Thus,

four of the six grade 8 anthologies facilitate links between Nazi death camps and

Japanese American relocation camps, albeit in very different ways. Yet, not one directly asks students to discuss the implied parallels.

Grade 8 teachers can easily imply the analogy, if they so choose, even when they

happen to be using an anthology with a Holocaust selection that contains nothing

on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. They may simply

ask their students to read, in addition to ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’’ Farewell to

Manzanar. It is frequently recommended for grade 8 students. Indeed, in a

sourcebook for teachers published by the California State Department of Education,

a study question for Farewell to Manzanar suggests that students ‘‘compare

Manzanar with the German concentration camp in I Am Rosemarie’’ (a story about

a young Dutch Jewish girl who is deported with her whole family to a Nazi concentration camp).4 The sourcebook does not suggest that they discuss differences as

well. Students can thus be helped to make an association between Nazi extermination camps and the relocation camps for Japanese Americans regardless of what

is in the literature anthology used by the class. Moreover, whether or not there is

class discussion about the differences in the real-world outcomes for the Japanese

Americans and the European Jews, students will likely see the internment of the

Japanese Americans solely as an expression of anti-Japanese prejudice because complete information is rarely given in the text or the teaching apparatus on how the

policy was formulated, by whom, and the limitations of its scope. Indeed, the lack

of detailed information on this historical episode in the teaching apparatus, given

that discussions based on accurate details are unlikely in an English class, reinforces the impression that the editors may not have been averse to creating an unambiguously negative image of Americans during World War II.

Grade 8 teachers can also easily imply the analogy or make it explicit, if they so

choose, when they happen to be using an anthology with a selection on the internment of Japanese Americans but without a selection on the Holocaust. Many grade

8 teachers assign ‘‘The Diary of Anne Frank’’ as an independent literary text to supplement the literature anthology they use. That might well be the case for grade

8 teachers using Macmillan McGraw Hill’s 1997 grade 8 anthology Spotlight on Literature; it contains several selections on the Japanese internment.
29

5Lucy Dawidowicz, ‘‘How They Teach the Holocaust.’’ Commentary, December, 1990, p. 31.

Is it possible that the appearance of these particular pieces by Japanese American

authors in these four grade 8 anthologies is a result of happenstance? It seems unlikely for several reasons. No selections on the internment of Japanese Americans

during World War II appear in anthologies for grades 7 or 9. With only one exception, no literature on the Holocaust appears at these grade levels. Nor do stories

or essays on the internment of the Japanese Americans appear in anthologies for

grade 11, which tend to focus almost exclusively on American literature. An anthology on American literature is not an appropriate place for Holocaust literature, but

it would be for works by Japanese American authors on the internment experience

if they are works of literary merit appropriate for high school students. Nor is it

the case that the only publishable works by Japanese American writers are those

that focus on the internment experience. To the contrary, other pieces by Japanese

American authors, including many by Uchida herself, appear at other grade levels.

One may reasonably conclude that the editors of these four anthologies wanted

to make it possible for students to see a connection between the Nazi extermination

camps and the relocation camps for Japanese Americans. Moreover, one may also

conclude that the editors are aware that these two phenomena are not parallel expressions of racism despite some surface similarities, and that it would be unethical

to imply that they were or to invite students to compare them without providing

further information on the limits of our wartime policy and the reasoning of our

president, the courts, and others in approving the policy. I draw this conclusion precisely because the teaching apparatus in the anthologies that contain information

or selections on the internment of the Japanese Americans never suggests to teachers that they have their students compare the two phenomena. And it is an accepted

practice for editors to ask students to compare two or more works in an anthology.

Literature anthology editors who want Anne Frank’s diary or the play based on

it studied as a literary text and/or who want to reduce the possibility of false analogies use the literary context to direct the reader’s attention to Anne Frank’s character, to the theme of the work, and to the selection as an example of a particular

literary genre or literary tradition. Macmillan offers the play in its 1991 grade 8

anthology as an illustration of the genre of tragic drama, preceding it with a comedy

by Edmund Rostand. This dramatic contrast focuses the reader’s attention naturally

on Anne Frank’s personal qualities. EMCParadigm Publishers suggests this contrast

in genres in a different way; in its 1997 grade 8 anthology, the play is paired with

a prose adaptation of Shakespeare’s ‘‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’’ In McDougal,

Littell’s 1989 anthology and Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s 1993 anthology, Anne

Frank’s story appears in other contexts that help students see her character as the

central meaning of the work. McDougal, Littell does so by using an excerpt from

the diary as an example of autobiography and then grouping it with an essay by

Helen Keller, an excerpt from Of Men and Mountains by William O. Douglas, and

‘‘The Rose-Beetle Man’’ by Gerald Durrell. These are then followed by several biographical pieces, including one by Carl Sandburg about Lincoln and an excerpt from

John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, all of which provide a broad context highlighting individual faith, strength of will, and courage in achieving personal or social

goals despite extraordinary physical or intellectual challenge if not the specter of

death itself. In Holt, Rinehart and Winston, the play about Anne Frank is grouped

with Carl Foreman’s script for ‘‘High Noon,’’ a dramatic work that emphasizes individual courage and integrity in the context of a community that has failed to take

a moral stance.

What might anthology editors recommend as a possible moral lesson to be drawn

from studying literature about the Holocaust, a lesson teachers might invite their

students to discuss? Lucy Dawidowicz, a historian of the Holocaust, suggested in the

last article she wrote before her death that ‘‘the primary lesson of the Holocaust’’

is the Sixth Commandment, ‘‘Thou shalt not murder.’’ 5 She also believed that if the

study of the Holocaust was to have application to this country, it should lead students to see the fundamental difference between a constitutional government ruled

by law and authoritarian or totalitarian governments that legitimated persecution

of a specific people and used terror to inculcate obedience or silence dissenters. How

defenseless minorities are scapegoated in societies with problems their governments

are unwilling or unable to address would be an appropriate question for a class to

discuss after reading literature about the Holocaust. But I have yet to find such a

question suggested for class discussion in response to reading the literature on the

Holocaust. For meaningful cross-cultural comparisons of concentration camps, excerpts from A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch or Gulag Archipelago would be
30

6Facing History and Ourselves Annual Report 2001–2002.

7Margot Stern Strom and William S. Parsons, Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and

Human Behavior. Watertown, MA: Intentional Educations, 1982. 8Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior. Brookline, MA: Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., 1944. 9The chapter on the Armenian genocide seems incoherently inserted into the FHAO curriculum because the manual fails to call attention to any of the extraordinary parallels in the histories of the Armenians and the Jews, both ancient peoples of the Middle East. The chapter

on the Armenian genocide provides an informative chart on the origins and history of the Armenian people, a map of historic Armenia, information on how Armenians had seen autonomy if

not independence during the nineteenth century as the best way for a religious and ethnic minority to be protected, and a brief note on how the Armenian response to their genocide by the

Turks led to the establishment of an Armenian Republic (later taken over by the Soviet Union)

and the desire of many Armenians to regain control of their lost homeland in Turkish Armenia. 10 Although its scholarship on the details of the Holocaust is scrupulous, the historical framework FHAO offers for the study of the Holocaust in the 1982 (and 1994) teacher manual is crucially flawed. If the ‘‘final solution’’ was about anything, it was about anti-Semitism. Yet, only

a 22 pages-long chapter provides reading selections on the history of the European Jews and

on the causes of anti-Semitism. And it contains nothing on the origins of the Jewish people,

their early history, and why so many were in Europe altogether, Western or Eastern. Nor are

there later readings on the response to the Holocaust by what was left of world Jewry. Because

most appropriate and useful. Yet no excerpts from these works appear in the anthologies that include Holocaust literature, at least in those published in the 1990s.

Moral Equivalence in the Social Studies Class

Perhaps the strongest source of influence on the school curriculum suggesting a

moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and America is Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), an organization that provides materials and services to over 16,000

teachers ostensibly to help them address ‘‘racism, antisemitism, and violence.’’ 6 Its

web site conveys the scope of its activities, here and abroad. Although other Holocaust curricula are taught in some schools across the country, FHAO is by far the

most popular source of training and materials on the Holocaust, and its prominence

has increased since Steven Spielberg decided to give it income from showings of

‘‘Schindler’s List.’’ According to FHAO’s web site, it now reaches over 1.5 million

adolescents through its teacher network, and over 4,500 schools through regional offices in six major cities in the U.S., in addition to an office in Europe. FHAO describes itself as having an ‘‘interdisciplinary approach to citizenship education’’ and

is supported by grants from many sources, including the Goldman Sachs Foundation

and the Germenhausen Foundation, with the grant from the latter targeted to ‘‘expand outreach in Europe.’’ The FHAO curriculum is flexible and can be taught over

a long or a short period of time and at any grade level, although it most frequently

takes about six to eight weeks to cover and is usually taught in grade 8 or 9. FHAO

urges as much interdisciplinary cooperation between English and social studies

classes as possible to help students ‘‘think deeply about issues of racism, prejudice

and discrimination, and to be active participants in promoting social justice.’’

FHAO’s goals and how it seeks to achieve them were spelled out in its first major

resource book, titled Holocaust and Human Behavior, published in 1982.7 This

teacher manual was superseded in 1994 by a substantially revised resource book

with the same title but now framed by the assumption of equivalence between Nazis

and Americans and still in use.8 In 2002, FHAO published an additional resource

book titled Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement

and has just begun to introduce this book at institutes and workshops, and to develop an online course based on the book. The contents of these three resource books

reveal how this organization has evolved from laudable beginnings in the 1970s by

a grade 8 social studies teacher in the Brookline Public Schools interested in moral

education and in teaching about the Holocaust to become a major vehicle for smearing American history, American citizenship, and American science with the foul

brush of Nazism. The contents also provide the basis for a case study in how the

social activism underlying many of the K–12 curricular trends of the 1970s and

early 1980s metasticized into the manipulative and malignant anti-American moralism of the 1990s and 2000s.

The 1982 resource book seeks ‘‘to promote awareness of the history of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Armenian people, an appreciation for justice, a concern for interpersonal understanding, and a memory for the victims of those events’’

(p. 13). It also seeks to make comparisons and parallels to past and contemporary

issues, events, and choices when appropriate, with a major goal of helping today’s

students prevent an event such as the Holocaust from happening again. About 63

pages of the manual’s 400 or so pages address the Armenian genocide.9 The rest

deal with the Holocaust, originally the sole focus intended by FHAO.10 Because of
31

the Holocaust is so inadequately contextualized in this manual, students are unlikely to learn

(in this curriculum) how much the Holocaust influenced the determination of Jews after the war

to re-establish a country of their own so that they could become a nation like other nations,

what their ancient homeland had been, and why they chose to return there. Nor are they apt

to examine the manifestations and sources of contemporary anti-Semitism. The 1982 manual almost completely ignores contemporary anti-Semitism—its continuing virulence in some of its

traditional settings and its new sources elsewhere. Only five pages in this manual offer short

readings dealing in any way with contemporary anti-Semitism, and these pages appear in the

same 22 pages long chapter on the history of the European Jews—before the manual discusses

German history, the rise of Hitler, and the Holocaust itself. 11Telephone conversations with Margot Strom and her associate, Steven Cohen, April 1989. 12 In its final chapter, the manual briefly suggests some parallels with My Lai or the experiences of the Japanese Americans and the Indians after carefully noting that while ‘‘no single

historical event duplicates the Nazi deed, many share different aspects of the process that led

to the death camps’’ (p. 219). Also played up briefly is the erroneous notion that Auschwitz is

linked to ‘‘a cultural tradition of slavery’’ that is part of Western history only. Most of the material in the final chapter centers on three topics, which are the ones recommended for class discussion to encourage civic participation and moral decision-making: (1) the ruling by the State

of Arkansas requiring equal treatment in the teaching of evolutionary theory and creationism

in the schools, and the lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union charging that the ruling

violated academic freedom, (2) the role of the Moral Majority with respect to freedom of speech,

and (3) the use of nuclear weapons by the United States in World War II, the continuing development of nuclear weapons, and the potential for a nuclear holocaust without arms control.

These topics were popular with social activists at that time, the last one in particular.

FHAO’s stated belief at the time that a study of the Holocaust must have a ‘‘positive’’ ending 11 and that American social studies teachers would not find it useful

unless it was connected to the need for active citizen participation in a democracy,

the final chapter addresses political issues in contemporary American life.12

FHAO’s goal of providing ‘‘positive’’ civic lessons for Americans is the source of

the central problem with this curriculum. To enable teachers to use the study of the

Holocaust for stressing the importance of citizen participation in America and for

urging students to speak up and act in the face of perceived social wrongs, FHAO

chose to rely on a psychological explanation for the behavior of the Nazis and of the

Germans who supported or acquiesced in the Nazis’ rise to power. In doing so,

FHAO could portray the Nazis as exhibiting ‘‘human behavior’’ (hence the title of

the resource book) in whatever they did. Such a conceptual framework seriously

downplays the deep-rooted cultural and political forces that shape human behavior

and differ considerably across cultures. A neglect of cultural and political forces well

serves the purposes of the 1994 resource book. Although it contains little that explicitly connects anti-Semitism and the psychology of the Nazis and their supporters

to America’s social problems and the psychology of Americans, its conceptual framework has allowed small acorns to grow into mighty oaks.

The purpose for studying the Holocaust is now to confront ‘‘the history of racism

and antisemitism at home and abroad’’ (p. xiii). The preface begins with a reference

to an article by Marion Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund about the

struggle today ‘‘for the nation’s conscience and future’’ as ‘‘the American Dream is

collapsing,’’ pitting American against American ‘‘as economic uncertainty and downturn increase our fears, our business failures, our poverty rates, our racial divisions,

and the dangers of political demagoguery’’ (p. xiii). In the twelve years since the appearance of the first resource book, America has become in FHAO’s eyes a nation

consumed by hatred and violence. FHAO now sees our students as having been

carefully taught to hate, and attributes ‘‘much of the violence that threatens our society’’ to ‘‘its roots in bigotry and hate’’ (p. xiii). This demonic view of American

schools and American society is unrelieved throughout the book. If this curriculum

had been designed for German educators, one might understand the melodramatic

injunction in the preface that ‘‘we do not want yet another generation of young people influenced by propaganda to march blindly in someone else’s parade’’ (p. xviii).

Since we have not had such a generation in America, it is clear that America and

Nazi Germany have merged as one country in FHAO’s eyes.

The 1994 resource book leaves no stone unturned in its efforts to make sure that

students see the task of confronting white racism in America as the chief reason

for studying the Holocaust. Its first and last two chapters concentrate on racism and

violence in American history and contemporary life. Such a framework enables

FHAO to associate even Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln with the history

of Nazism. The text points out that Lincoln regarded Africans as inferior in his

early years, and notes Jefferson’s status as a slaveholder and his words about Africans as a threat to ‘‘white racial purity’’ (pp. 76–77). Students are later asked to

compare African Americans to European Jews (pp. 94–96). Questions in five other

chapters also invite comparisons between events in American history (almost always
32

13FHAO has emphasized racism and violence in American life in its workshops and annual

conferences on human rights over the past decade. For example, of the many workshops offered

for the first annual FHAO Learn-A-Thon that took place in Brookline in May 1994, less than

half dealt with the Holocaust itself. Almost all the other workshops dealt with social issues in

America. These included ‘‘Science and Society: Retrieving the Forgotten History of the Eugenics

Movement in the United States,’’ ‘‘Lost Hopes, Shattered Dreams: The Streets of Boston Today,’’

‘‘Ordinary Heroes: Winners of the Reebok Human Rights Award,’’ which featured a talk by a

woman who is helping battered women, ‘‘Joining the Dialogue: Communities of Color and the

Information Super Highway,’’ ‘‘Teaching Children in Violent Times,’’ ‘‘Respecting Differences:

Towards a New Legal Definition of Family,’’ and ‘‘Names Do Hurt Me: The Stereotyping of ‘NonAryans’ in Nazi Germany and of Asian Americans in the US Today.’’ The range of social issues

with which the study of the Holocaust has become associated is almost stupefying to consider. 14Deborah Lipstadt’s expression of outrage in her New Republic article over FHAO’s rationalization of Farrakhan’s behavior in its 1994 resource book led to a flurry of activity by FHAO.

There were about 20,000 books in FHAO’s warehouse containing the page on which it had appeared, I was told Several months after the article appeared, I bought another copy of the book

and found the passage no longer there. However, FHAO had neglected to remove Farrakhan’s

name from the index. It is still there even though the page it refers to contains nothing on him.

with reference to black Americans) and the history of racism, anti-Semitism in Europe, and the rise of Nazi Germany. FHAO’s 1994 resource book moves back and

forth with conceptual ease from Nazis to Americans and consistently ignores the

possibility that what happened in Germany might best (or at least also) be understood as a political and cultural phenomenon. It makes explicit and frequent links

not only between 20th century America and 20th century Germany but also between

19th century America and 19th century Germany.

For example, students are asked to compare the patriotism and military service

of black Americans in World War I with the patriotism and military service of German Jews in Germany in World War I (p. 113). Activities of the Ku Klux Klan in

America after World War I are compared to the rise of the Nazis in Europe after

World War I, in addition to other parallels between Weimar Germany and post

World War I America (pp. 125, 132, and 133); indeed, the Klan is elevated to a more

prominent place in American history than the Democratic or Republican Party. The

text also compares American schools and school texts in the 1930s and 1940s to German schools during the Nazi era (pp. 243–244) and asks students to compare

Kristallnacht to an incident in Boston in which a rock was thrown through the window of a Vietnamese family (p. 267). Students are asked to discuss when the word

holocaust is a useful metaphor for other events after the text points out that ‘‘African Americans have labeled their experiences with slavery and dehumanization a

‘holocaust’ ’’ (p. 310). The book even closes with a query about whether the violence

that it suggests is all about us in American life might lead to another Holocaust,

clearly implying that the victims of this Holocaust will be African Americans (p.

564).13

In the March 1995 issue of The New Republic, Deborah Lipstadt expressed her

unhappiness with the context into which FHAO placed the Holocaust in this resource book, pointing out that ‘‘no teacher using this material can help but draw

the historically fallacious parallel between Weimar Germany and contemporary

America’’ (p. 27). Not only did she criticize FHAO’s efforts to insinuate this analogy,

she also saw little to be learned from FHAO’s efforts to link the Holocaust to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the My Lai Massacres, or the mass murders in Cambodia, Laos,

Tibet, and Rwanda as other examples of ‘‘mass destruction.’’ It is worth noting that

FHAO avoids references to the Soviet gulags, the inspiration they provided for the

Nazi death camps, or the mass murders committed by communist regimes among

its examples of mass destruction. Nevertheless, the 1994 resource book has very

clear moral injunctions for Americans. Students must help make sure that white

America ends what FHAO claims has been a denial of black American history; it

must also apologize and make amends (pp. 505–513). And to reinforce the notion

of how hurt blacks have been, the text offers in what may be its most incredible

passage a sympathetic reference to Louis Farrakhan (and it is the only reference

to him in this manual). He is deliberately singled out as one of those blacks who

speaks ‘‘directly to the pain and pride’’ of all black people, with only a quick passing

remark in the text that parts of Farrakhan’s message ‘‘stereotype and demean other

groups’’ (p. 507). Not even a clue that the very people he has stereotyped and demeaned are those against whom the Holocaust was directed. It is understandable

why the 1994 text would find it difficult to discuss black anti-Semitism since it uses

the Holocaust to portray America’s blacks as Europe’s Jews. But the attempt to

whitewash Farrakhan can be judged only as morally perverse.14

FHAO’s latest resource book, Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement (RMAH), is 356 pages long and consists of 76 chapters or lessons

called ‘‘Readings.’’ Its cover contains a montage of various faces, all unknown and
33

unidentified except for that of Adolph Hitler. These chapters contain snippets of primary source materials (excerpts from college textbooks, books written by scholars,

speeches, editorials, personal anecdotes, and magazine articles), strung together by

explanatory narratives authored chiefly, it appears, by an associate program director for FHAO, a former high school social studies teacher in the Brookline public

schools. Each chapter is followed by ‘‘suggestions for independent research or group

projects.’’ According to the Foreword, RMAH was written to ask us ‘‘to rethink what

we know about our own past. While barely remembered today, the eugenics movement represents a moral fault line in our history. It was a movement that defined

differences in terms of racially superior and inferior human traits. Because these

ideas were promoted in the name of science and education, they had a dramatic impact on public policies and the lives of ordinary people at the time and, in turn, created legacies that are still with us today. The eugenics movement is not a historical

footnote. It is a fundamental chapter in our history that ought to be examined in

our classrooms.’’

The Overview explains the connection to the Holocaust. RMAH ‘‘focuses on a time

in the early 1900s when many people believed that some ‘races,’ classes, and individuals were superior to others,’’ using a ‘‘new branch of scientific inquiry known

as eugenics to justify their prejudices . . .’’, and while ‘‘in the United States, the

consequences were less extreme,’’ in Nazi Germany, ‘‘eugenics was used to shape

and ultimately justify policies of mass murder.’’ The brochure advertising RMAH

also makes the connection clear, stating that ‘‘racism and eugenics had worldwide

appeal. In Nazi Germany, they were used to justify the Holocaust. In the United

States they limited opportunities for millions of Americans.’’ To facilitate teachers’

access to the readings that explain the ‘‘connections between the American eugenics

movement and its counterpart in Nazi German,’’ the Overview notes that, in a departure from previous practices (materials from its resource books have not appeared on its web site before), FHAO’s web site now provides an instructional module with the readings that trace these connections.

What is the exact connection FHAO wants students to see? A causal one—that

Americans and American science, however indirectly, were responsible for Nazi Germany’s extermination policies and the Holocaust. There is no other conclusion American students can draw. Although RMAH makes clear that few American scientists

subscribed to the eugenics movement by World War II, the chapters on ‘‘The Nazi

Connection’’ artfully quote from various sources to indicate that Hitler drew upon

the ideas of many respectable German scientists for his ideas on racial ‘‘eugenics’’

and that these German scientists not only supported Hitler and his use of their

ideas but also acknowledged the leadership of American scientists, educators, and

policy makers in the eugenics movement. Karl Brandt, the head of the Nazi program for the killing of the mentally disabled, is also quoted as telling the court, in

his defense after World War II against the accusation of participating in government-sponsored massacres, that the Nazi program for the sterilization and elimination of ‘‘life not worthy of living’’ was based on ideas and experiences in the

United States (p. 282).

FHAO also implies that the eugenics movement was the American equivalent to

Soviet Lysenkoism in its effect on scientific development, although Lysenkoism is

never mentioned in RMAH. On p. 274, RMAH quotes ‘‘scientist Jonathan Marks’’

saying in a 1995 book that if biologists ‘‘did in fact widely see the abuse to which

genetic knowledge was being put, but refused to criticize [the eugenics movement]

out of self-interest, they paid dearly for it. As historians of genetics have noted, the

eugenics movement ultimately cast human genetics in such a disreputable light that

its legitimate development was retarded for decades.’’ Using this book as their informational resource, social studies teachers so-inclined would be able to suggest to

their students that while Stalin might have retarded Soviet biology for decades by

his support of Lysenko’s ideas, American biology was retarded during these same

decades by something even worse—racism and the goal of eliminating people, or the

reproduction of people, with undesirable genetic traits. Any doubt about RMAH’s

ideological allegiance is dispelled by its praise of Henry Wallace as ‘‘one of the few

American politicians to challenge both Nazi racism and American eugenics’’ (p. 283).

Despite the massive amount of citations and excerpts to prop up the book’s implicit thesis and explanatory narratives, it is telling that FHAO fails to acknowledge

even one biologist as a reviewer or to give a biologist’s assessment of the influence

of the eugenics movement on American science. Jonathan Marks is not a geneticist;

he is an anthropologist by training and an associate professor in the Department

of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. And,

eminent scientists who have written about the history of evolutionary biology imply

a very different judgment about the influence of eugenics on the history of American

biology. For example, eugenics is mentioned in one short, four-sentence paragraph
34

15 Ernst Mayr, Evolution and Diversity in Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976,

paperback reprint 1997) p. 318. 16Personal communication from Paul R. Gross, University Professor of Life Science, emeritus,

University of Virginia, former President and Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory,

Woods Hole, Massachusetts. August 14, 2003. 17That the American eugenics movement was responsible for Nazi racial policies and the Holocaust is the explicit thesis of Edwin Black’s latest book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and

America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).

in Evolution and the Diversity of Life, a 722-page collection of essays by Ernst Mayr

on the history of important ideas and movements in evolutionary science. 15 Moreover, from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, American biology moved from a secondary position in world biology to the very forefront, as indicated not only by the size

of the enterprise but by the number of Nobel prizes won by Americans and the number of leaders of biological and medical science here who had escaped from Nazism.

FHAO itself provides no evidence that the legitimate development of American biology was ‘‘retarded for decades’’ by eugenics. It doesn’t because it can’t. All it can

do is quote the judgment of an anthropologist.

A curious reader might also wonder why no biologists are quoted on their assessment of the influence of the eugenics movement on German science. Perhaps because they would support the judgment of Paul R. Gross, who writes:

Eugenics, positive and negative, has had no significant influence on the course of

biological or biomedical science. Some of its sillier notions may have been used here

and elsewhere, in the past, by racists as justification for their opinions; but there

has been no visible effect on basic life science or the practice of medicine. The vast

majority of biologists today, if asked to define ‘eugenics,’ would have trouble coming

up with anything like a correct statement. Many would not have heard of it and

most would be entirely unaware of its history. It has been forgotten, except by a

few ideologues of the far left and right for whom it continues to be a cause celebre.

There was some currency of eugenic ideas among social reformers and other intelligentsia—mostly non-biologists—in the period roughly from 1910 to 1935, and among

the subset of racists and anti-Semites within that group. This made no visible difference to the character and progress of life science, in the United States or in Europe. To connect American eugenics with the Nazi Holocaust is a monstrous exercise

in special pleading.16

The history of the eugenics movement should be better known. The American eugenics movement at the height of its influence was responsible for the forcible sterilization of thousands of Americans and did contribute ideologically and sometimes

financially to the rise of Nazism in Germany. 17 Nevertheless, one must ask why an

organization devoted to a study of the Holocaust should expend its energy compiling

information on the history and influence of the eugenics movement in America as

if it, rather than the centuries of negative cultural stereotypes and religious hatred

of Jews in Christian Europe, were instrumental in the development of Hitler’s Final

Solution, a history FHAO has studiously ignored since its inception. In her critique

of FHAO and other Holocaust curricula used in this country, Lucy Dawidowicz commented that the most serious failure she found was the omission of the history of

anti-Semitism as a matter of public policy over the centuries and its roots in Christian doctrine. High school social studies teachers are likely to accept FHAO’s implicit thesis and teach it to their students if FHAO’s resource books are their only

source of information on a topic that high school science teachers are unlikely to

address in their classes (unless high school science textbooks are influenced by

FHAO’s ideological sympathizers).

It is not surprising that, according to FHAO’s Annual Report for 2001–2002,

FHAO conducted an intense institute in Stockholm this past year at the invitation

of Sweden’s Department of Education, with the expectation that the contents of the

institute would be taught to other Swedish teachers. Although there seems to be no

evidence that the Swedish government today is concerned about anti-Semitism in

Sweden or in the rest of Europe, it has evinced a consistent interest in racism in

America. It is also not surprising that FHAO has begun to provide teacher training

seminars in Berlin for German teachers in the past several years. What better way

to relieve lingering German guilt over the Holocaust than by helping young Germans see an American-dominated eugenics movement at the turn of the 20th century as ultimately responsible for Nazi racial policies and the Holocaust. Interestingly, among the scholars FHAO features at these Berlin seminars is Ian Hancock,

a professor of English and linguistics and an authority on the Roma who has

claimed that the lack of scholarship on Gypsy victims of the Holocaust is ‘‘due, in

part, to efforts by some scholars to maintain the uniqueness of what happened to
35

18 In an essay in Alan Rosenbaum ed., Is the Holocaust unique? Perspectives on Comparative

Genocide (Boulder,CO: Westview Press, 1996), as described by Christopher Shea in an article

‘‘Debating the Uniqueness of the Holocaust,’’ The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 31, 1996:

A7–8.

the Jews.’’ 18 By using a scholar who seeks to justify the focus on the all-encompassing umbrella of racism by implying self-interest on the part of those scholars trying

not to lose the focus on anti-Semitism (or, more accurately, to regain it), FHAO

makes its own ‘‘educational’’ goals even clearer.

Effect of the FHAO Curriculum on Teachers

Although the 1994 FHAO resource book is framed by the assumption of moral

equivalence between Nazi Germany and contemporary America, it never explicitly

states that the two are equivalent. One can only speculate to what extent impressionable students who study its curriculum and read the Diary of Anne Frank will

transfer their feelings about the Nazis to our own society. However, I have been

able to collect some evidence on how the thrust of FHAO’s evolving curriculum has

affected teachers themselves, through the influence of its own workshops alone or

with the help of graduate course work in a school of education. One example is a

syllabus created in 1994 for a new course for students in grades 10, 11, and 12 in

an upper middle class suburban high school in a Western State. Designed by two

new teachers overtly seeking to address intolerance in this country, this syllabus

just about takes for granted a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and contemporary America. I received a copy of this syllabus from one of the two teachers

as part of the application material for admission to a 1994 summer institute on civic

education that I directed at that time at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

A recent graduate of a masters program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this teacher must have been proud of this syllabus or she would never have

sent it with the application.

According to the course description, it emerged from a school district’s decision to

expand its multicultural education program for the 1993–1994 school year. It was

also developed to ‘‘confront the growing issues associated with diversity at the high

school.’’ It claims that the issues of ‘‘hatred, prejudice, racism, and indifference’’ are

the social issues that students at this high school confront daily, a claim that is difficult to believe for an upper middle class high school with an extremely high

achieving student body. Indeed, the school district’s scholastic scores rate second in

the State, according to information I received from the Chamber of Commerce. Nevertheless, the course was approved by the principal, the superintendent of schools,

and the school committee and started being taught in the 1994–1995 school year.

The syllabus for ‘‘Culture, Power, and Society’’ explicitly connects the psychology

of the Nazis and pre-World War II German culture with American cultural values

and attitudes. Indeed, it suggests that the psychology of the Nazis and their supporters is an inherited cultural characteristic of most of the American population.

The course outline makes its thrust crystal clear; the first unit deals with ‘‘socialization and the ethos of the American psyche (aka Why we are the way we are)’’ and

examines the ‘‘self and the individual in American society.’’ Unit Two, which is on

racism and anti-Semitism, explains that it ‘‘will explore the roots of bias in our society’’ (emphasis mine). It goes on to state that after examining where and how racist

attitudes are formed (for example, through stereotypes, segregation, and isolation),

students will culminate the unit with the reading of Night and an extensive look

at the Holocaust. In the fourth of the five units in the syllabus, students study

homophobia in the United States. One does not doubt that they will link Nazi persecution of homosexuals to the ‘‘injustice suffered by homosexual individuals’’ in America.

In only one way is it understandable why these teachers have found the study

of the Holocaust so useful for addressing prejudice and bigotry in this country. It

provides them with the most horrendous image possible of a prejudiced person, an

image that can be connected under the enormous umbrella of the concept of intolerance to the image of the white racist in America. With the abolition of slavery and

the disappearance of lynching bees, prejudiced behavior in this country is generally

invisible. Violence may be visible, but bigotry is not. What could better symbolize

prejudice or intolerance and make a more powerful impression on young minds than

images of the Nazis, the death camps, and the gas chambers? The course is not just

a waste of academic time; it has the potential for much harm. It explicitly assumes

that the ‘‘prejudiced personality’’ discussed in the required textbook The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson can be generalized to all Americans and then harnesses to

this false generalization the power of a normal adolescent’s emotional response to

the Holocaust. Sustained by such a negative force, this generalization, however spe-
36

19 According to The Anne Frank Center, its goals are to: Effectively introduce young people

to Anne Frank, the Frank family’s personal story, and the history of the Holocaust; Help young

people and communities explore the difficult issues of discrimination, intolerance, and bias-related violence in a positive and constructive way; Engage young people to examine and challenge

discrimination, intolerance, and bias-related violence; Carry the Center’s anti-bias message to

isolated areas and under-served communities across the nation, where people seldom have opportunities to discuss the problems of racism and discrimination, and to effect community-initiated action; Illustrate the importance of personal responsibility and tolerance by honoring those

individuals who actively confront prejudice and bias-related violence.

cious, has the potential for cultivating in young students a negative attitude towards their society, its political institutions and principles.

Other examples of the effects of FHAO’s workshops on teachers appeared in other

application material to me. One grade 8 teacher proudly explained how, after taking

a number of Facing History workshops, she had restructured her teaching of To Kill

A Mockingbird to ‘‘help prepare students for the Facing History unit in social studies.’’ Her students ‘‘are now being asked to look for parallels between Nazi Germany

and the U.S., looking at U.S. slavery and subsequent racism as our holocaust. . . .

I will read them excerpts from Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace to help them begin

to see the ghettos that exist today. That’s what I might like to focus on at the institute: the connection between contemporary ghettos of poor blacks in American cities

with the ghettos and extermination of Jews and others in the Holocaust.’’

It should be noted that it is not easy for outsiders to find out what takes place

in Facing History workshops. Only teachers from the schools that have arranged

(and paid) for the workshop can attend, and the web site that enables these teachers

to exchange ideas about classroom practices and resources is password-protected.

Moral Equivalence in the Anne Frank Journal

The moral equivalence of America and Nazi Germany has been promoted in the

teaching materials accompanying yet another effort to stimulate the reading of Anne

Frank’s diary in the schools and to educate students about the Holocaust. According

to a 1991 brochure, the Anne Frank Journal was used as part of an educational program around the exhibition ‘‘Anne Frank in the World 1929–1945,’’ produced by the

Anne Frank Centre in Amsterdam and distributed in America through the Anne

Frank Center in New York City.19 Adapted from educational material for secondary

schools in Holland, the Journal served as preparatory material for a visit to the exhibition or for follow-up. It was also used to accompany the reading of the play

based on Anne Frank’s diary, the diary itself, or other reading materials on the Holocaust. Bearing a strong resemblance in vocabulary and ideological thrust to the

1994 FHAO manual, the 1993 edition of the Journal was based on the assumption

that ‘‘the study of history is most meaningful when it has significance for present

day society.’’ It stressed ‘‘the need for every individual to make a choice . . . when

racial violence . . . is common.’’ It aimed to ‘‘encourage young people to examine

their own experience with racism and discrimination and to make them consider

their own responsibility in racist events they encounter.’’ As does FHAO, it subsumed anti-Semitism under racism so that it could deal with racism against blacks

in this country. Its brochure contained a few photographs showing acts of anti-Semitic vandalism in Great Britain and Holland, but its chief concern was with the

racism of ‘‘fascists’’ and neo-Nazis towards ‘‘people of color’’ in America and Western

Europe. Despite the fact that the neo-Nazi movement in America was by the Journal’s own admission not a large one, students were nevertheless asked to ‘‘collect

newspaper clippings about neo-nazi activities and anti-fascist actions’’ and to discuss

the ‘‘similarities and differences between Berlin 1934, Paris 1986, and Neo-nazism

in the USA.’’

The Journal’s ideological agenda was clearest in a section called ‘‘A Message of

Hate.’’ It asked students: ‘‘How is the ‘White Supremacy’ movement in the U.S. different from the Nazis and neo-Nazis? How is it the same? . . .Discuss why this

movement is particularly American. Discuss the effects of a history of slavery in the

United States on today’s version of white supremacy?’’ And, similar to the anti-white

hate-mongering apparent in the 1994 FHAO resource book, the Journal concluded

its list of suggested questions for students with: ‘‘Could today’s racism lead to something like the Holocaust?’’ The question clearly does not have the Jews in mind as

the victims of this Holocaust.

The Journal was published for a number of years, although it is no longer listed

on the web site for the Anne Frank Center.

The Call for More Literature on Intolerance in the English Class

Pre-college students also read a great deal about the Holocaust in both their

English and social studies classes because of national professional encouragement.
37

In the spring of 1994 the Executive Committee of the National Council of Teachers

of English (NCTE) approved a resolution urging teachers to let their students read

and discuss literature on ‘‘genocide and intolerance within an historically accurate

framework with special emphasis on primary source material.’’ Again, genocide has

been conflated with the far broader concept of intolerance. Part of the rationale offered for the resolution was the need to counter the attempt to deny that the ‘‘European Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s’’ ever happened, although it is not clear why

NCTE thought this effort was needed in English classes in as much as Anne Frank’s

story is offered in all of the leading literature anthologies and is regularly one of

the most popular titles in trade book sales. The NCTE also created a task force titled Committee on Teaching about Genocide and Intolerance to compile a list of resources to assist teachers in ‘‘planning and producing instructional materials on the

rhetoric and literature of genocide and intolerance.’’ The rationale given in the announcement of the resolution stated that ‘‘continuing acts of racial, ethnic, class,

and religious hostility are occurring in increasing numbers in the United States and

around the world’’ . . . and that these ‘‘destructive forces of intolerance and bigotry

must be countered in every setting.’’ Those who see themselves fighting the forces

of Satan in this country could not have articulated their goals with more spirit. Indeed, the militancy in this statement evokes the image of the religious zealots orchestrating the Inquisition or the Salem witch hunts. It also suggests that an implementation of the resolution may well result in an even greater association than now

exists between the Holocaust and any past or contemporary incident in this country

that is construed as an act of prejudice.

In 1999, NCTE published the work of this Committee titled Teaching for a Tolerant World: Essays and Resources, for grades 9–12. As one might expect, essays and

resources addressing the Holocaust appear together with those addressing African

Americans, Asian Americans, ‘‘Chicanos/Chicanas,’’ Native Americans, and Gays

and Lesbians. Only two essays in the entire collection suggest that intolerance or

genocide might be attributable to other than Americans or Nazis. One deals with

the effects of twentieth century genocide against women, describing the experiences

of Armenian and Cambodian women among others. The other essay—on the

Ukraine Famine—manages to indict Americans and other Westerners for not reporting the famine when it took place—a splendid example of how the Left manages to

cover up its own culpability by casting blame on the West in situations where it

is chiefly responsible for withholding facts or misleading the public.

Use of the Study of the Holocaust Proposed by the National Center for History in the Schools

The guidelines in the National Standards for United States History proposed in

1994 by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles seem to reinforce the idea that the main purpose for studying the

Holocaust in American schools is to indict the United States. The guidelines dealing

with the Holocaust (pp. 201–202) in this document are as follows:

‘‘Demonstrate understanding of World War II and the reasons for the Allied victory by: . . .

Analyzing the dimensions of Hitler’s ‘‘Final Solution’’ and the Allies’ response to

the Holocaust . . .

Grades 7–8: Explain what was meant by the ‘‘Final Solution’’ and draw from primary sources such as eyewitness accounts, oral history, testimony of Nazi officials,

and documentary photographs and films to examine the human costs of Nazi genocide. Using letters, laws, and newspaper articles, identify FDR’s immigration policy

toward Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany. How did Americans respond to news

of the Holocaust?

Grades 9–12: Construct a historical argument or debate to examine Allied response to the Holocaust. When did the Allies discover the scope of Nazi persecution

of European Jewry, as well as the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other groups? What actions did European nations and the United

States take to support Jewish immigration? Why did the Allies fail to organize rescue attempts and resist appeals to bomb rail lines leading to Auschwitz and other

camps?’’

There is no question in this document about why the American press (especially

The New York Times) consistently underreported the Holocaust as it was taking

place. Nor is there a question about the effect of the Holocaust on support by the

U.S. for the establishment of the State of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust is completely

severed in this document from questions about the establishment of the State of

Israel, a topic covered about 15 pages later. Interestingly, the two questions the document poses in this later section seem to be getting at something else. The document asks: ‘‘Why did the U.S. State Department oppose recognition of the new State
38

of Israel in 1948 and why was the U.S. the first country to extend recognition?’’ (p.

217)

The Costs of Turning America into Amerika

The school curriculum is being increasingly used today not to help students understand the cultural history of an ‘‘other’’ but to call attention to a prejudice

against nonwhite people that some educators and editors see as the dominant characteristic of all Americans of European descent (including, ironically enough, the

survivors of the Holocaust in America). One certain cost in the effort to make America look morally equivalent to Nazi Germany is the transformation of the literature

class into a pseudo-social science class. Can Anne Frank’s reflections about life and

people, or Elie Wiesel’s spiritual and philosophical responses to the Holocaust, be

at the center of student attention or be contemplated at all in classrooms where

teachers are eager to have students address racism, sexism, violence, alternative

family structures, or homophobia in this country?

One cannot help but ask this question when the organizing topic for a group of

instructional selections is clearly racial prejudice and all its victims, aside from

Anne Frank, are Americans. A particularly egregious example of the way Anne

Frank’s story is used as the linchpin for grouping an array of victims of American

prejudice appears in Macmillan’s (1994) instructional reader for grade 7. The editors

have grouped together excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary and a biography of Anne

Frank by Miep Gies (a member of the Dutch family that hid the Franks) with poems

by an American Indian and an African American, a story about an American Indian

child, an anecdote about a Puerto Rican child, a chapter from Thurgood Marshall’s

biography, an excerpt from Martin Luther King’s Nobel Prize speech, and an excerpt

from Beyond the Divide, a novel by Kathryn Lasky about a brave Amish girl who

survives the wilderness in the Old West of 1849 with the help of a small group of

American Indians. According to the afterword in the novel, this group of Indians

was in fact gradually massacred by white settlers over the next two decades and

eventually obliterated as a tribe.

The thematic motifs suggested by the editors for this unit, entitled ‘‘Reach Out,’’

are courage, faith, determination, and the need for the help of others to survive or

succeed in attaining one’s goals. But even if the teacher emphasizes these motifs

and does not use this convenient grouping of victims of prejudice to make explicit

connections between Nazi racism and the prejudice directed at blacks, Hispanics,

and Indians in this country (or between Nazi racism and slavery or the killing of

American Indians in the nineteenth century), what young student reading this unit

could fail to sense and internalize the intended associations. This unit is one of the

cleverest examples of moral manipulation I have come across. The editors must

have spent a great deal of time sifting through journals and various data bases in

order to locate a group of selections about victims of prejudice in this country at

the right reading level that could be put together with a Holocaust selection to facilitate transfer to white Americans of the moral revulsion that is the normal response to Nazi behavior.

A second cost may lie in the way in which students come to view the Holocaust

itself when examples of ‘‘intolerance’’ can range from the Final Solution to, say, the

views of the parents who opposed the Rainbow curriculum in New York City, as

they were regularly characterized by editorials and news reports in The New York

Times. The Holocaust cannot help but be trivialized when the language used to classify it as a topic of study in English classes is no different from the language used

to describe Rush Limbaugh’s views on feminists and others.

The greatest costs are clearly civic and intellectual in nature—an even deeper discrediting of our political principles, procedures, and institutions, the stimulation of

greater interracial hatred, and a decline in the capacity to grasp and make important intellectual and moral distinctions especially in reference to this country’s principles. The latter can be illustrated in an op-ed essay by Ellen Goodman in the

Thursday, August 28, 2003 edition of the Boston Globe on the removal of a granite

block containing the Ten Commandments from the grounds of an Alabama courthouse. She opens her essay with an anecdote about a Muslim who had murdered

his adulterous mother on the grounds that she had dishonored the family but who

expected an Islamic court to exonerate him on the grounds that this would be the

‘‘ruling of God.’’ Goodman says she doesn’t know how jurists using the Koran as

their law book ruled in this matricide (nor did she indicate if she had sought to find

out whether civil authorities had sought to prosecute the murderer in a civil court,

or if one existed), but she sees this anecdote as an example of a struggle between

democracy and theology in Iraq that is similar to ‘‘our own struggles with theocracy

and democracy.’’ In other words, in Goodman’s thinking, Chief Justice Roy Moore’s

placement of the monument on courthouse grounds in an attempt to convey the his-
39

torical fact that the American legal system is rooted in a particular moral code (the

Sixth Commandment of which is ‘‘Thou shalt not murder’’) is analogous to an expected use of the Koran by Islamic judges to justify murder. Whether or not an

American judge is a Christian or an atheist and such a monument can be on courthouse grounds, an American judge’s rulings remain rooted in a particular moral

code. The issues are whether an American judge has the authority to place any

monument of his choice on public grounds and whether the placing of this particular

monument amounts to the establishment of a particular religion rather than serving

as a reflection of a historical fact.

Most English or social studies teachers who use literary or non-literary materials

that imply similarities between Nazis and Americans do so, I believe, because they

have been taught through the media but more directly through course work in

schools of education (and probably in humanities courses in the arts and sciences)

to see intolerance (or social injustice) as this country’s enduring original sin. Moreover, it is not irrelevant that well over 80 percent of K–12 teachers today are white

middle class females. Sexism has been so consistently associated with racism, religious bigotry, and homophobia as types of discrimination practiced by white heterosexual males that it is not difficult for female teachers today to identify themselves

with other victims of bias and to accept the implied or explicit extension of the psychological dynamics of white male Nazis to white Americans as reasonable and as

independent of the specifics of the discriminatory act itself. In addition, the desire

to epater le bourgeois is as much a part of American literary and non-literary history (e.g., Mark Twain’s satires) as is the feminist zeal to correct our moral

failings—the latter being particularly characteristic of white Protestant females in

the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also not irrelevant that the inspiration for FHAO

came from courses in moral education taught by Carol Gilligan at the Harvard

Graduate School of Education in the mid-1970s, and that work on FHAO’s resource

book on the American eugenics movement during the 1990s was funded through the

Harvard/Facing History and Ourselves Project (p. ix), with Gilligan serving as a

major advisor.

The earlier effort by some educators (and others) to suggest a moral equivalence

between America and the Soviet Union has had of necessity to be altered. The equation now appears to be evolving into one between America and Nazi Germany, with

a new twist implying that American science in the 19th and early 20th century was

responsible for Nazi racial policies—and the Holocaust. Attempts by the pedagogical

moralists in our schools or publishing houses to address intolerance in America by

reducing America’s moral status to that of Nazi Germany in the eyes of the young

must be addressed openly as a public policy issue regarding the school curriculum,

not sheltered from open criticism and discussion as a matter of teachers’ academic

freedom or pedagogical judgment.

Senator ALEXANDER. Mr. Hagopian?

Mr. HAGOPIAN. Senator Alexander, I am honored to be here and

grateful for this opportunity. I find that it is an opportunity to describe the classroom context within which these books are used as

I share my textbook selection experiences out in California.

Let me start. In the world of the ideal classroom, the course offering is history, not social studies. Even E.B. White’s adventuresome mouse, Stuart Little, knew this. When, along his wayward

journey, Stuart was pressed into service as a substitute teacher, he

stood on a stack of books on top of the desk and offered comments

to the students as they ran through their subjects. Some of you in

the room may remember this. When the students brought up social

studies, Stuart Little said: ‘‘Never heard of them.’’ By implication,

he and his author had studied history, the well-told story that aims

to be comprehensive as it imparts, as has been said here today,

civic literacy and public memory. Engaged in this real-world endeavor, students advanced their reading, writing, public speaking,

and reasoned judgment capabilities. Studying history, after all, is

self-rewarding—the more you know, the more you want to know.

This ideal classroom that I want to describe here is staffed by a

history teacher. he or she has read and written history, hopefully

more American history—Ms. Stotsky’s point is a key one—broadly
40

and deeply. History occupies a place of importance in his or her

life, and because of this, the teacher transmits a contagious enthusiasm about events, personalities, words, acts, deeds. I call it the

broad sweep—it is interwoven in nature—and the controversial aspect of this discipline comes through in the lessons.

Activity varies—reenactment, essay writing, speeches, debates,

document annotation, biographies, mapping, time-lining, researching, polling, interviewing, and comprehensive exams that help establish what I believe is a platform of understanding, a basis for

going on.

Exchange between students and teachers is as lively as the links

between past and present are profound. In this saturated environment I am describing, students produce history as well as study it.

They recognize history’s uses and grow to realize that the subject

offers invaluable background for any life endeavor. Careful reading

and notation of understanding forms a basis for all the activity and

outcomes I mention. These habits are conspicuous in the ideal history classroom.

We know that across the United States, high praise is in order

for classrooms that do match this description or whose scope and

ambition exceed it—and many do. We also know that in too many

classrooms, something called ‘‘social studies’’ is offered, of which

history is one little, self-contained part, like one of many dishes on

a buffet table.

Sadly, we know that too many history classrooms are staffed by

teachers with too little background in or enthusiasm for the subject. We also know that in too many classrooms, too much and

sometimes all instruction is from the textbooks, a condition captured in an old favorite cartoon of mine in which the teacher is saying to the class: ‘‘Today is February 5, so we must be on page 403.’’

Alarming, too, is something else of which we are all aware. Careful reading and notation, as textbook expert Gilbert Sewall, seated

to my left, has observed, is a fast-disappearing habit. Not surprisingly, the National Assessment of Educational Progress continues

to show low student achievement in history and civics.

However dismal and discouraging these plain realities may be, I

am heartened—and I must say energized—by great efforts that I

have seen over the past decade and a half to revitalize history

study in the United States. I am intrigued by the example you gave

this morning from U.S. News and World Report; I cannot wait to

see that list of 100 documents and see which ones on the banned

list I am using. I had better be careful.

The tremendous interest that I have found in pre-collegiate history instruction of numerous academic historians, great teachers in

their own right, is so encouraging, whether in those wonderful

Gilder-Lehrman or National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars, those insightful events sponsored by the National

Council for History Education, those ambitious teaching grants in

American history colloquia, or the ongoing enrichment provided by

History Channel and PBS broadcasts, and I should mention Ken

Burns films, and here in this region, I should mention the tremendous efforts at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the

Smithsonian, and Colonial Williamsburg, the growing partnerships

of interested teachers, academic and Park Service historians and
41

others is casting a widening ray of light over history study in our

Nation.

I have been supported as well by my home State of California’s

History Framework. I went to Dr. Ravitch, to my left, who I believe

was given honorary citizenship in the State of California for her efforts in producing that. First published in 1988 and largely renewed with updates in 1997, this great guide offers a well-articulated and planned K–12 curriculum specifying content at all levels

through its accompanying grade-level standards.

For me, my States’s history framework has served as a bulwark

against efforts, sometimes considerable efforts, and educational

fads—many, many of those—that otherwise might have succeeded

at deemphasizing the history content that I believe I have been

able to practice.

Please make one more addition to that ideal history classroom I

have been describing. Place there for each student a truly distinguished textbook. Its lively, sustained narrative conveys to the

learner through lean, vigorous prose and peppery detail so telling

that readers are transported to the times and sites of great events,

crucial decisions, and legacies of all kinds. The author often lets

history’s eyewitnesses and documents of an era tell the story. The

textbook’s illustrative material tends toward original art, portraits,

documentary photographs, related maps and artifacts. And only

modest space is given over to those chapter reviews.

The ideal book offers a clear historical chronology, but it presents

our story in a seamless fashion. As outstanding as the book may

be, students’ reading and notation is not the end-all of their history

study but merely a prelude to historical engagement.

In reality, American students are increasingly issued textbooks

as we have been saying that fall embarrassingly short of this ideal.

The narration resembles, as David McCullough has noted, an old

piano teacher’s favorite lament: ‘‘I hear you play all the notes, but

I hear no music.’’

Often, in the textbooks under my review, the narrative is

shrunken, thin in detail, inaccurate in places and, most bothersome

of all, interrupted page after page by panels of poofs, puffs, color

bursts, and by TV-screen-shaped, short, quick, get-your-history-onthe-go windows, with little narrative in between. The overall format seems attuned to that of the tabloids, television episode sequencing, and as I have said in other forums, the backs of cereal

boxes.

Today’s history textbooks are increasingly unitized, and that is

too bad. After all, the Civil War is a defining, transformative, national experience—only in its most artificial sense is it a ‘‘unit of

study.’’ Books that break something so compelling as the story of

American freedom into a series of units that place more emphasis

on pedagogy, pre-tests, posttests, scrambles, and other puzzles do

dampen among learners the natural ardor that I believe they have

for history.

My own experience with California State adoption and local selection of history textbooks for my eighth-grade students extends

back through three cycles. I should say right here that I am fortunate to work in a school district that has supported the text selections that I have made for my grade level. In 1983—I will do a
42

quick history of this—I selected from among perhaps half a dozen

State-adopted texts A Proud Nation. That was the title. In format

and approach, this was a comparatively simple, straightforward

book. As I set its presentation of nine or ten historical episodes

side-by-side with those of others on the market, I detected a good

measure of its author, Ernest R. May’s, vivid prose that had impressed me when I read several of his works in graduate school.

I found more attention paid to detail, less to puzzles and games,

and where there was some special feature, he developed full, flavorful, telling anecdote rather than the kind of fragmentary account

often found in the competitors’ books.

If A Proud Nation was historically meaty, The Story of America,

which I named for selection in 1990, is even more so. the volume

is heavy, perhaps weighing 61⁄2 pounds. Now, there is another police—the backpack weight police. We are getting a lot of that pullby-the-handle luggage to take care of that. So when I assign the

book to my students, I ask them to keep it at home in a clean, welllighted place, ready for use—and use the book we do. The students

return from nightly readings with careful reading notes or identifications that we work toward improving throughout the year.

While daunting at first for some students, most do grow accustomed to the demands of the reading. No textbook is full-blown

ideal. However, John A. Garraty’s The Story of America, with its

comprehensive narrative, document basis, rich art and portraiture

comes closer to the ideal, at least, than any other entry in the last

three adoption cycles.

In fact, in the subsequent adoption year, 1999, when Story of

America was replaced, and I collected California’s new adoptions

for consideration, not one of them came even close to my history

book gold standard. All, in my opinion, had embraced the thing,

fragmented, distracting pitfalls I have already described.

It seemed to me that several of the new books exhibited another

minus—they avoided controversy—and they were far from simple

books in format and came with superfluous ‘‘kits.’’ These text supplements more often than not amounted to extra puzzles and jumbles rather than documents or photo aids. And these books are absurdly expensive, I should say. I recall assembling a group of

eighth-graders and letting them compare the new books in the textbooks sweepstakes according to an ideal textbook criteria, and I

asked them to include Mr. Garraty’s book in the comparison—and

hands down, they chose Story of America. I was secretly glad.

So in 1997, I sought out Gilbert Sewall’s advice as the time approached to make my textbook selection. Mr. Sewall recognized

that with my own history background and the materials and documents that I used, my students and I would fare just fine through

another adoption cycle by purchasing from the publisher’s warehouse enough extra copies of Story of America to have on hand

through 2004.

I will conclude here. Back home, another promising school year

has begun. Along with teaching duties, I will be involved in another foray into history textbook selection as we have reached the

end of yet another cycle. I am not aware of any reversal in the book

publishers’ retreat from quality. Trying to ‘‘think big’’ the other
43

night, I tried to envision how to precipitate movement along a path

toward history textbook excellence.

I determined that all it would take is some economic robustness

and a Governor in just one State who would take one bold step.

Buoyed by the diverse efforts to revitalize history instruction that

I have already mentioned, this Governor would ask history professors at his or her various State university campuses to assemble

the brightest, best, most articulate and most enthusiastic history

undergraduates, with hopefully more than a little, let us say,

United States history study and plenty of world history study.

Then, in an act of great foresight, this Governor would personally

recruit these promising collegians to the State’s history classrooms

and to careers as history teachers. The Governor would then call

upon the leading school system educators and beckon them to in

every way make the profession more attractive—attractive enough

to divert away some of the customary traffic from the law, business, and banking schools. History classrooms thus staffed would,

I believe, lead to a demand for better books, and I believe this

would create some attention across the Nation.

If we say we want to strive for the best, I believe we must think

big.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Hagopian follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ROBERT HAGOPIAN

Mr. Chairman, Committee Members, and Staff, I am indeed honored and grateful

to have this opportunity to testify on the quality of history textbooks in our schools.

Because I have been so involved in their selection and use over my 32-year teaching

career and because I recognize their utility in history instruction, I applaud your

interest. Today I find it necessary to describe the classroom context within which

these books are used as I share my textbook selection experience.

In the world of the ideal classroom, the course offering is history, not social studies. Even E. B. White’s adventuresome mouse, Stuart Little knew this. When along

his wayward journey Stuart was pressed into service as a substitute teacher, he offered comments to the students as they ran through their subjects. When the students brought up social studies, Stuart Little said, ‘‘Never heard of them.’’ By implication, he—and his author—had studied history, the well-told story that aims to be

comprehensive as it imparts civic literacy and public memory. Engaged in this realworld endeavor, students advance their reading, writing, public speaking, and reasoned judgment capabilities. Studying history, after all, is self-rewarding: the more

you know, the more you want to know.

This ideal classroom is staffed by a HISTORY teacher. He or she has read and

written history, broadly and deeply. History occupies a place of importance in his

or her life, and, because of this, the teacher transmits a contagious enthusiasm

about events, personalities, words, acts, deeds, the broad sweep—interwoven in nature—and the controversial aspect of this discipline. Activity varies: reenactment,

essay writing, speeches, debates, document annotation, biographies, mapping, timelining, researching, polling, interviewing, and comprehensive exams that help establish a platform of understanding. Exchange between students and teacher is as lively as the links between past and present are profound. In this saturated environment, students produce history as well as study it. They recognize history’s uses and

grow to realize that the subject offers invaluable background for any life endeavor.

Careful reading and notation of understanding forms a basis for all the activity and

outcomes I mention. These habits are conspicuous in the ideal history classroom.

We know that across the United States, high praise is in order for classrooms that

match this description or whose scope and ambition exceed it. We also know that

in too many classrooms something called social studies is offered, of which history

is one little self-contained part, like one of many dishes on a buffet table. Sadly we

know that too many history classrooms are staffed by teachers with too little background in or enthusiasm for the subject. We also know that in too many classrooms

too much—and sometimes all—instruction is from the textbook, a condition captured
44

in an old cartoon in which the teacher is saying to the class, ‘‘Today is February

5, so we must be on page 403.’’ Alarming, too, is something else of which we are

aware: Careful reading and notation, as textbook expert Gilbert Sewell has observed, is a fast disappearing habit. Not surprisingly the National Assessment of

Educational Progress continues to show low student achievement in history and

civics.

However dismal and discouraging these plain realities may be, I am heartened—

and, I must say, energized—by great efforts I have seen over the past decade and

a half to revitalize history study in the United States. The tremendous interest in

pre-collegiate history instruction of numerous academic historians, great teachers in

their own right, is so encouraging. Whether in those wonderful Gilder-Lehrman or

National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars, those insightful events

sponsored by the National Council for History Education, those ambitious Teaching

Grants in American History colloquia, or the ongoing enrichment provided by History Channel and PBS broadcasts and Ken Burns films, the growing partnerships

of interested teachers, academic and park-service historians and others is casting

a widening ray of light over history study in our nation. I have been so supported,

as well, by my home State of California’s History Framework. First published in

1988 and largely renewed with updates in 1997, this great guide offers a well articulated and planned K–12 curriculum, specifying content at all levels through its accompanying grade-level standards. For me my State’s history framework has served

as a bulwark against efforts and educational fads that otherwise might have succeeded at de-emphasizing history content.

Please make one more addition to that ideal history classroom I have been describing. Place there for each student a truly distinguished textbook. Its lively, sustained narrative, conveys to the learner through lean, vigorous prose, and peppery

detail so telling that readers are transported to the times and sites of great events,

crucial decisions, and legacies of all kinds. The author often lets history’s eyewitnesses and documents of an era tell the story. The textbook’s illustrative material tends toward original art, portraits, documentary photographs, related maps,

and artifacts. And only modest space is given over to chapter reviews. The ideal

book offers a clear historical chronology, but it presents our story in a seamless

fashion. As outstanding as the book may be, students’ reading and notation is not

the end-all of their study but merely a prelude to historical engagement.

In reality, American students are increasingly issued textbooks that fall embarrassingly short of this ideal. The narration resembles, as David McCullough has

noted, an old piano teacher’s lament: ‘‘I hear you play all the notes, but I hear no

music.’’ Often, in the textbooks under my review, the narrative is shrunken, thin

in detail, inaccurate in places, and, most bothersome of all, interrupted page after

page by panels of poofs, puffs, color bursts, and by TV-screen-shaped, short, quick,

get-your-history-on-the-go windows with little narrative in between. The overall format seems attuned to that of the tabloids, television episode sequencing, and, as I

have said in other forums, the backs of cereal boxes. Today’s history textbooks are

increasingly unitized, and that is too bad. After all, the Civil War is a defining,

transformative national experience; only in its most artificial sense is it a ‘‘unit of

study.’’ Books that break something so compelling as the story of American freedom

into a series of units that place more emphasis on pedagogy, pre-tests, post-tests,

scrambles, and other puzzles do dampen among learners what I believe is a natural

ardor for history.

My own experience with California State-adoption and local selection of United

States History textbooks for my eighth-grade students extends back though three

cycles. I should say right here that I am fortunate to work in a school district that

has supported the text selections that I have made for my grade level. In 1983, I

selected from among perhaps a half dozen State-approved texts, A Proud Nation. In

format and approach, this was a comparatively simple, straightforward textbook. As

I set its presentation of nine or ten important historical episodes side by side with

the others on the market, I detected a good measure of its author Ernest R. May’s

vivid prose that had impressed me when I read several of his works in graduate

school. I found more attention paid to detail, less to puzzles and games. And when

there was some special feature, he developed a full, flavorful, and telling anecdote

rather than the kind of fragmentary account often found in the competitors’ books.

If A Proud Nation was historically meaty, The Story of America, which I named

for selection in 1990, is even more so. The volume is heavy, perhaps weighing six

pounds. So when I assign the book to my students, I ask them to keep them at home

in a clean well-lighted place ready for use. And use the book we do. The students

return from nightly readings with careful reading notes, or identifications, that we

work toward improving throughout the year. While daunting at first for some of the

students, most grow accustomed to the demands of the reading. No textbook is full-
45

blown ideal. However, John A. Garraty’s The Story of America, with its comprehensive narrative, document basis, rich art and portraiture comes closer to the ideal

than any other entry in the last three adoption cycles. In fact, in the subsequent

adoption year, 1997, when Story of America was replaced and I collected California’s

new adoptions for consideration, not one of them came even close to my history book

gold standard. All in my opinion had embraced the thin, fragmented, distracting pitfalls I have already described.

It seemed to me that several of the new books exhibited another minus: they

avoided controversy. And they were far from simple books in format and came with

superfluous ‘‘kits.’’ These text supplements more often than not amounted to extra

puzzles and jumbles rather than documents or photo aids. And these books are absurdly expensive. I recall assembling a group of eighth graders and letting them

compare the new books in the textbook sweepstakes according to an ideal-textbook

criteria, and I asked them to include Mr. Garraty’s book in the comparison. Hands

down, they chose Story of America.

So, in 1997, I sought out Gilbert Sewell’s advice as the time approached to make

my textbook selection. Mr. Sewell recognized that with my own history and materials and documents, my students and I would fare just fine through another adoption cycle by purchasing from the publisher’s warehouse enough extra copies of

Story of America to have on hand for students through to 2004.

Back home, another promising school year has begun. Along with teaching duties,

I will be involved in another foray into history textbook selection, as we have

reached the end of another adoption cycle. I am not aware of any reversal in the

book publishers’ retreat from quality. Trying to think big the other night, I tried

to envision how to precipitate movement along a path toward history textbook excellence. I determined that all it would take is some economic robustness and a governor in just one State who would take one bold step. Buoyed by the diverse efforts

to revitalize history instruction I have previously mentioned, this governor would

ask history professors at his or her various State university campuses to assemble

the brightest, best, most articulate, and most enthusiastic history undergraduates.

Then in an act of great foresight, this governor would personally recruit these promising collegians to the State’s history classrooms and to careers as history teachers.

The governor would then call the leading school-system educators together and

beckon them to in every way make the profession more attractive—attractive

enough to divert away the customary traffic flowing to the law, business, and banking schools. History classrooms thus staffed would lead to a demand for better

books. If we say we want to strive for the best, I believe we must think big! Thank

you.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you to all four of you for your written and your oral testimony.

Senator Ensign has joined us, and what I would like to do is take

about 5 minutes and ask questions, and then I will turn it over to

him for 5 minutes, and we will just go back and forth unless someone else comes. Then, we will end the hearing at about 11:30.

Listening to your comments, I began to make a list of all the obstacles to the ideal kind of textbook that you described, although

it was interesting to me that you were actually able to choose one,

and you somehow made your way through, Mr. Hagopian, all of the

obstacles and were able to select a textbook.

On my list are: weak textbooks, weak standards, social studies

instead of history, adoption committees, bias and sensitivity committees, no competition in the publishing industry, or not much,

low teacher qualifications, colleges of education that do not emphasize history, Federal legislation that emphasizes things other than

history, and then, one which to me increasingly seems to be at the

root of it all—a real difference of opinion in the United States and

especially among many professional educators about whether it is

really important to teach American history, whether it is really important to have a common culture or whether we are a United

States of America or just a lucky sort of United Nations, with people having arrived in this great, big place with lots of money and

opportunity, and we just should be happy of wherever we came
46

from, without much regard to wherever we have come. Now, those

are a lot of obstacles, and Senator Ensign, before you came, I wanted to encourage the panelists to give ideas back and forth, so let

me try to focus in on this.

You have described in the development of standards, Dr. Stotsky,

and also, Dr. Ravitch especially in the writing of textbooks, this

army of ideologues from the right and the left and from the right

wing, the left wing, and every wing, as you said, Dr. Ravitch, who

descend upon the standard-writers or the textbook writers and

publishers or the test-writers, and insist that everything be just

thus and so. And I guess they descend upon teachers as well perhaps who are even more vulnerable, because they are there by

themselves, and if you teach about the underground railway or you

teach about religion or you teach about something in a way that

someone does not like, you are going to hear from some of these

people often in an organized way.

So with tests, with standards, and with classroom teaching, I

guess an obvious question is how do we provide a counter to those

special interest groups. One example of what usually happens in

American society is that you have counter-groups. You have some

broad-based group or groups or some institutions that take the

other side of it and say, Whoa, wait a minute.

I will give you example. In the legislation that the Senate passed

90-to-nothing, we talk about two things in the First Amendment—

the free exercise of religion as well as not establishing a religion.

By the time it got over to the House of Representatives, someone

wanted to change that because they did not want to talk about the

establishment of religion.

That is the kind of thing that goes on. I am going down on Friday to Tennessee to a celebration of those who were in the battle

of King’s Mountain, which was a Revolutionary War battle. This

was a bunch of pioneers who won that battle, and their reason—

they went down on their knees to pray with a fire-and-brimstone

teacher named Samuel Doake before they went over the mountain

to fight, a big prayer about the Lord and Gideon which has been

recorded in all of our textbooks in Tennessee—but the reason they

were fighting was because they were tired to paying taxes to support the bishop of a church that they did not belong to.

So it is a wonderful story that emphasizes the importance of religion even to those pioneers and how it pervaded every aspect of

their lives. They would not go out and fight a battle without it, yet

it also provides a story of what we meant when someone wrote into

our Constitution that we did not want an established religion in

this country. Yet many teachers, even Congressmen, many textbooks, many tests, I guess, shy away from a discussion about what

we mean by the free exercise of religion and what we mean by the

establishment of a church.

So how do we provide a counter-balance to all of these people

from every wing who have a perfect right in our country to say

what they believe? One possibility might be that the Albert Shanker Institute has put out a recent study which has a lot of signatories from every direction. I notice that just at Harvard, they have

Henry Lewis Gates and Harvey Mansfield agreeing, which is pretty

good, and if we have that kind of background of a broad base of
47

diversity, maybe the Albert Shanker Institute or other institutes in

America might provide a counterweight.

So how do we go up against the zealots and give some light to

the textbooks, the tests and the classroom teaching?

Dr. Ravitch?

Ms. RAVITCH. Senator Alexander, I want you to add to your list

of the problems the very act of the State adoption process, because

that is where these very small groups—it can be just a letterhead

group—can get people frightened and intimidated. And if you have

a true marketplace where there are 3 million teachers buying textbooks like Mr. Hagopian—he selected a textbook that is actually

going out of print. The two best textbooks that I am familiar with—

one is the Boorstein-Kelly Book—the lead author is Daniel

Boorstein, the emeritus librarian of Congress, which is a wonderful

book; and the Garraty book—but the States today say these books

are too hard. Kids cannot read all this text. They need more graphics and more dazzle and more web pages. So they are going out of

print. But they should not go out of print. If there were a real marketplace, he could continue to find a publisher delighted to sell

30,000 copies instead of a million copies and able to make a reasonable profit going to his market.

I wanted to make a couple of other observations, and they bear

on this point. I was on a talk show one night, talking about this

subject, and man called in and said, ‘‘I am in Denton, TX, and I

went to the State history adoptions, and I did not like the way the

textbook presented the story of what happened at Omaha Beach.

They called it’ a tragic day at Omaha Beach.’’’

So I sat down with the State board, and we rewrote the story,

and it is now ‘‘a heroic day at Omaha Beach.’’ Well, that is fine,

but you know, that is a political rewriting of history, and if everybody gets to rewrite everything that they do not like in the textbook, what in the world will kids get other than this kind of homogenized pap?

Another point on the same subject is that as a member of the

National Assessment Governing Board, I saw a letter come in a few

months ago from a woman who said, ‘‘I see that one of your questions relates to the Armenian genocide. I am of Turkish descent,

and there was no Armenian genocide. Please take that question

out.’’

Well, a lot of test publishers would drop the question because

they do not want to have a problem, but the staff actually went to

the trouble of going to the Library of Congress, going to a number

of eminent historians, and after a review that consumed months,

responding to that parent and saying, ‘‘We are sorry—we disagree

with you—there was an Armenian genocide, and the question is

not going.’’

But not many publishers would be willing to show that degree

of courage.

Just one other point about the question that Sandy Stotsky mentioned on multiple perspectives. This is now a mantra in the social

studies field. We do not have a point of view; we teach multiple

perspectives. This is in fact a dishonest statement. We do not teach

the point of view of the slave owners. We do not teach the point

of view of Hitler and the Nazis. We do not teach the point of view
48

of the Holocaust deniers. We do believe that there is a perspective

that American citizens learn, and it is the perspective of democratic

institutions, the rule of law, and the principles that are embodied

in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. And as long as the social

studies field continues to cling to this idea of multiple perspectives,

we cannot teach American citizenship or civic values or democratic

values because that represents a point of view, and that is not acceptable.

But the question that I would like to turn to ask my fellow panelists, since you encouraged us to discuss, is one that I——

Senator ALEXANDER. Before you do that, what about my question—how are we going to provide a counterweight to the people

you described as left wing, right wing, and every wing? How do you

embolden textbook publishers, teachers——

Ms. RAVITCH. It was in my first statement, which is——

Senator ALEXANDER. To get rid of the adoption.

Ms. Ravitch [continuing]. If the States stopped adopting textbooks, that would open up the marketplace for small publishers.

Senator ALEXANDER. How did that get started?

Ms. RAVITCH. It got started after the Civil War because the

Southern States did not want anyone to use textbooks that taught

the story of the Civil War from a Northern perspective, so they

wanted to control the textbooks that came into their States and

make sure that the story that was told in Georgia and Mississippi

and Alabama and Louisiana and other States that took this decision to adopt textbooks, their children would learn of the war of

Northern aggression.

Senator ALEXANDER. Did that then spread to the rest of the country?

Ms. RAVITCH. It spread to some States because they thought they

saw some advantage to it. California did not have that reason, and

I have—Gil will know better; Gil is a Californian, and maybe Mr.

Hagopian can comment on this—but I read a dissertation on California’s decision to begin State textbook adoption, and it seemed to

be for reasons of efficiency, but it has certainly not made the materials cheaper; if anything, they are more expensive than they have

ever been.

Senator ALEXANDER. But basically, we have a situation now

where every State or most States have it?

Ms. RAVITCH. Twenty-two.

Mr. SEWALL. About half the States, mainly in the West and

South. The original rationale behind State adoption was quality

control. This is no longer the case, and in fact the three largest

State adopting States—California, Texas, and Florida—are really

adopting almost everything that comes to the table.

Senator ALEXANDER. Say that again, please.

Mr. SEWALL. What the publishers submit, they are putting on

their lists.

Senator ALEXANDER. So in those three States——

Mr. SEWALL. So quality control is a joke.

Senator Alexander [continuing]. Which represent about 30 percent of all the people in the country would be those three States,

or more; they put on an approved list of textbooks for, say, U.S.

history or social studies——
49

Mr. SEWALL. Correct.

Senator Alexander [continuing]. About any book that the publisher sends them, but there is now only a limited number of publishers; is that correct?

Mr. SEWALL. At one time, States were selective, but this is no

longer the case because of consolidation.

Senator ALEXANDER. I will go to Senator Ensign, but just to get

to the bottom—then, how is Mr. Hagopian in California—California

has a State adoption process like that and a limited number of publishers, but you were still able to get a textbook that you thought

was a pretty good one, The Story of America; right?

Mr. HAGOPIAN. I thought the choices decreased through the three

cycles—six books, and I think they were—I do not know the size

of these publishing houses——

Senator ALEXANDER. What choices did you have, say, for U.S.

history?

Mr. HAGOPIAN. Two in 1990. There was Houghton Mifflin, and

there was Holt.

Senator ALEXANDER. Those were the only ones approved by the

California State review committee that decides what textbooks you

can use.

Mr. HAGOPIAN. Yes.

Senator ALEXANDER. What do you do—just ignore those textbooks when you teach your course?

Mr. HAGOPIAN. Well, fortunately, the Garraty book was one of

the two.

Senator ALEXANDER. But what do good teachers do when presented with dull textbooks?

Mr. HAGOPIAN. In 1999, that was exactly my question, and the

gentleman to my left helped me with an answer. He said: Stick

with what you have. Go to the warehouse.

Mr. SEWALL. Ask for a State exemption, which localities and districts can do, and use the old textbook rather than the new and socalled improved books that the publishers have brought to the market in 1999.

Ms. STOTSKY. I was going to respond to your question, too, if I

may, but I do not want to interrupt what you were going to say.

Senator ALEXANDER. Go ahead.

Ms. STOTSKY. I just wanted to take a stab at your question about

where might the sources of counter-pressure come from.

Senator ALEXANDER. Senator Ensign, the Massachusetts standards, which Dr. Stotsky is the chief administrator for, are among

the best in the country and withstood a series of attacks from these

various wings on the way up. I would be interested to hear how

you did that.

Ms. STOTSKY. One needs first of all a lot of transparency in the

process, and this may vary from State to State. You need to start

with some good people on an advisory committee, and who is appointed to that advisory committee should be on the front page of

the major newspaper in the State, why they were chosen. This at

least starts to get the process out in the open so it is not certain

groups controlling who gets to be appointed to be on the working

committee to develop standards. That is one place to start. And
50

they have to be publicized and the rationale for why they are on

the committee and who they represent needs to be clear.

Then, there need to be drafts that are made available, clearly,

and the major newspapers have to help out here. Again, we need

a lot of good public relations.

There also needs to be good representation from our different

branches of Government, because as you well know, if anyone has

a vested interest in the maintenance of our democratic institutions

and procedures, it is the people who are elected politicians in our

State Senate, State legislature, Governor’s office, and so on.

I was very fortunate to have one of our State Senators who

agreed to help chair the revision of our U.S. history standards. He

was an old history major, and he helped with a select group of history teachers work out the final revisions of our history standards.

He was a Democrat. We had a Republican Governor. So everybody

was happy because we had total bipartisan input, and no one could

say that the standards were either Republican standards or Democrat standards, because he was thrilled to work with a good group

of U.S. history teachers at the high school level and revise these

standards. He cared deeply about American citizenship, and he

spread the word to his colleagues in the State Senate that this was

what he was doing. So this was in a sense depoliticizing the standards by throwing it right into politics in a sense.

But that kind of transparency is part of what you need to activate.

A third group, I discovered by accident, and we are very fortunate in Massachusetts because our history in our State museums

and historical societies is national history to a large extent. We

were able to discover a huge number of State and local historical

societies and museums that had been ignored for 20 to 30 years,

and suddenly, they saw first drafts of standards that looked like

they were tapping traditional American history again. This was revising them because their holdings are all about American history.

They are not about the citizens of other countries. They are about

the citizens of this country. So that suddenly, we got hundreds of

letters asking to be a part in some way of the standards to help

implement the standards, so we have another group of people who

represent communities, chambers of commerce, very eminent citizens in all the towns that are active with historical societies and

local museums.

So there is another group that can be tapped to some extent, but

you need a big transparency in your process to do this.

Senator ALEXANDER. Senator Ensign?

Senator ENSIGN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you

having this hearing. I think it is a very important hearing, because

this is a serious problem that we have in our schools.

Obviously, in the time since a lot of us have gone to school, there

are hugh differences compared to what the schools are teaching

today. Dr. Ravitch, you were talking about perspective and the

multiple perspectives that we try to teach from. The argument that

I have heard used, is that, for instance, when somebody sees an accident or a crime being committed, and you take three different

witnesses, they may see different things. So, depending on who is

reporting the history it will depend on the perspective that they
51

write it, and therefore, they think that writing it from multiple perspectives is the way that we need to go.

Having said that, I agree with you. Part of teaching history, in

my opinion, is teaching those principles to our children, the next

generation. It is not only teaching historical facts; it is also teaching historical principles. And if you want to teach rule of law, if you

want to teach the importance of democratic principles, of free market principles, versus a socialistic or a communist type of perspective, you have to teach from the perspective that our Founders had.

From that perspective it can be taught how some of the things that

happened throughout our history and throughout world history—

why they have or have not worked. And if you try to be ‘‘politically

correct’’ and give equal weight to all historical perspectives, and

this is why they believed, and those kinds of things, I think you

just end up teaching mush to the children. You want them to be

able to critically think, but you also need to give them the perspective on history of what really worked and what did not, not just

here are these different perspectives, but also what historically has

worked.

Also, I fundamentally believe that a lot of this comes down from

the rejection of truth. If there is no truth in the world, then how

can there be moral absolutes? I love to go to the high schools and

ask kids are there moral absolutes? Most of the kids will say no.

So I will get one of the kids and say, ‘‘So there are no moral absolutes. Are you absolutely sure that there are no moral absolutes?’’

That always gets them to think a little bit.

But the rejection that there are certain rights and wrongs has

led us to where we are today. Now, having said that, who determines the individuals who serve on these bias committees? Do the

publishing companies rely on their own qualifications, or do they

rely on the guidelines provided by groups like the American Psychological Association?

Ms. RAVITCH. What I found, Senator, is that there has been an

accretion. In other words, the bias guidelines began to develop in

the late sixties and early seventies. A lot of the assumptions in

these guidelines have just become completely obsolete, but they

stay there forever. So that, for example, the Educational Testing

Service bans the use of the word ‘‘yacht’’ because ‘‘yacht’’ is an

elitist term, and no American child is supposed to know it, or only

the rich know the word ‘‘yacht’’ because they are the only ones who

actually have ever been on a yacht. Well, I have never been on a

yacht, but I know what it is.

The other assumption that the bias guidelines make, particularly

in the testing industry, is that girls cannot answer questions about

supports because girls do not participate in sports; girls cannot answer questions about the military because girls are not in the military. This is all totally obsolete, but it just keeps growing and

growing, and the list of topics or words that are banned remain

there.

I have come to the conclusion over months of talking to people

about these issues that the overwhelming majority of people thinks

this is ridiculous. I have had very little contact with people calling

and saying, ‘‘I demand that the word’ actress’ stay out of our vocabulary.’’ I mean, heaven’s stake, the Emmy Awards, the Academy
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Awards, and the Tony Awards give awards to actresses, the best

actress and the second leading actress, etc., and no one seems to

think this is a bad thing.

I read every day in The New York Times words that are supposed to not ever appear in a textbook. When David Brinkley died,

they ran an op-ed piece titled, ‘‘David Brinkley, Anchorman,’’ and

I thought, oh, good grief, don’t they know you are not supposed to

say that word?

I think all of this comes about because there really is no public

scrutiny, and I think that if the States would just agree to publish

their bias guidelines, make public the deliberations—what are you

removing, what are you deleting, what are you censoring—then we

could as citizens decide for ourselves whether this is reasonable or

whether it is ridiculous.

Senator Alexander had said we should talk to each other, and I

had a question because it is posed to me time and again. Whenever

I talk about the subject of this kind of bias and sensitivity review

and taking out words that offend anybody, anywhere, sooner or

later somebody says, ‘‘I am a concerned citizen. What can I do?’’ I

get emails all the time saying, ‘‘I want to join your organization,’’

and I do not have an organization; I am just a writer.

So what can we do to bring this out into the open, to develop

greater transparency so that those restrictions that are reasonable

are viewed by the public and remain there, and the ones that are

ridiculous get laughed out of existence.

Ms. STOTSKY. Could I suggest there is another aspect to it that

does need to be addressed as well. From my understanding having

been in the Department of Education, we were told over and over

again by our legal counsel whenever I raised questions about what

was being considered bias that it was very important to have bias

committees in order to protect the Department of Education, or

that schools needed them to protect themselves against lawsuits,

and that without bias review, there would be lawsuits that would

be consuming our time, and who would be having these lawsuits

against the Department or others would typically be the aggrieved

parents of students who are failing, who would then claim that students fail because there was either a hostile environment created

by insensitive questions or some—there is a particular legal language that is used that indicates that this is preventing a student

from performing at their best in answering a question because of

some damage created by the question. So that is the issue.

Senator ENSIGN. Could I just make a comment on that? I think

that that is so prevalent today. I grew up in the West, and in the

West, you have a certain perspective—you really do. It is different

from the East. First of all, Western history is taught more in the

West, and there is much more of the Civil War and the Revolutionary War taught here in the East. Because of proximity students

can learn it better back here. There is no question about that.

So because we in the West are at a disadvantage that we do not

live and breathe the history of the Revoluntionary or Civil War as

much in the West, should it not be taught? If you take this concept

to the nth degree, you could make the argument that because people in Alaska are isolated to a great degree, or people in Hawaii

have a different culture, that they should not learn what other con-
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tinental U.S. students learn because they are not exposed nearly

as much. This could lead people to say that sutdents in Alaska and

Hawaii would be disadvantaged on a test, because they are lot farther away because it is not part of the daily culture like it is for

someone who lives around Colonial Williamsburg. Certainly, their

perspective on history is going to be much more in their daily lives.

So I think that that is such an important concept to get out of

our teaching. Simply because it may disadvantage certain people

does not mean that we should dumb down our entire educational

system.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I know my time is up so I want to

thank the panel. This is a discussion that needs to be had a lot

more across the United States. One of the greatest powers that we

have as Senators or Members of Congress is the power to convene

people together, so I want to compliment you, Mr. Chairman, on

bringing this issue up and starting something that hopefully will

continue. We need to continue to push this issue much more dramatically. I will close with this. Back in the early 1800’s, there was

a man named William Wilberforce, and there were two things that

he did in his life. One was to abolish slavery in the United Kingdom. He was the one who was really, truly responsible for abolishing the slave trade. The other was the restoration of manners. And

when I say ‘‘manners,’’ I do not mean being polite. He wanted to

restore manners so that it again became politically correct to act

properly. In England it had become politically incorrect to treat

people with respect and to have good morals. What we have to do

as part of our responsibility as leaders is to lead the country in the

right direction instead of leading it in the wrong direction, and ensuring that students are taught the facts and not just historical

perspectives is all part of that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator ALEXANDER. Thank you, Senator Ensign, and we will

pass on the compliment to Senator Gregg, who dreamed up this

particular hearing, but it is a subject that Senator Ensign and

many of our Senators are very interested in.

Tomorrow, for example, David McCullough is going to join a

small group of Senators and congressmen to talk about how we can

identify all the various activities we have in the United States Government, of which there are a lot—there are more than we know,

really—various efforts to try to encourage the teaching of American

history and civics in particular, and then we probably will do the

same with groups outside of American Government.

I promised the panelists that we would bring this to a close at

about 11:30, so I will do that with this comment, maybe in a way

in answer to my own question. Dr. Ravitch suggested we get rid

of the State adoption process. That sounds like something well

worth pursuing, and maybe this panel could take its argument to

the meeting of the National Governors’ Association, which meets

twice a year, once in February and once in the summer. Many Governors might get most of their way through a term without knowing or understanding exactly how textbooks get adopted. I know

that I did, and I was pretty active in education. It is just not one

of the first things you do when you come in as Governor, to figure
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out what to do about that, other than appoint a few people to these

commissions.

But Dr. Stotsky, your suggestion about how you succeeded in

Massachusetts in establishing high standards and resisting narrow

interests was not to take your process to the back room but to take

it out in the open. In other words, in a way, you put your confidence in the broadest number of Americans, which is also a very

good lesson of American history going back to the beginning of our

country.

So maybe we need to look for ways to create and involve institutions and organizations that represent the broader number of

Americans rather than narrow interests and make them a part of

the process.

I happen to agree with that. I think, just as Dr. Ravitch found

out with her book, that once she lays this out there, most people

would think it was a Dave Barry column. They would not believe

it. They would think she made up the whole back section of her

book, it is so absurd, and you could not watch any movie or hold

any conversation without running afoul of some ridiculous prescription from a bias and sensitivity council, and you wonder why anybody is wasting money and time on such things, and hopefully, everyone is ignoring what they suggest, but they are not.

One other example of the idea of spreading out the broader number of people, if you will permit a little bit of a commercial, is that

the Senate passed by 90-to-nothing this year legislation which I

and many other Senators introduced to create summer residential

academies for outstanding teachers and outstanding students of

American history and civics. They are modeled on the idea of the

Governors’ Schools, which more than two dozen States have had for

a number of years. And I believe that if you were to bring together

200 of the best history and civics teachers in California, for example—the Mr. Hagopians of the world—and give them 2 weeks to

focus on that subject, we as Americans would be comfortable with

just about whatever they would come up with, because I think if

they are broadly selected and given their knowledge and background, they would excite one another, and they would develop lesson plans and ways to deal with subjects, ways to teach difficult

subjects or interesting subjects, go back to their schools and infect

those schools with new enthusiasm for the teaching of American

history and civics. And in the same way, if students of American

history and civics were able to spend a month at a summer residential academy sponsored, say, by the Library of Congress and the

University of North Dakota or the University of Massachusetts and

the John Adams House, or one of your historical associations, or

one of the National Park Service’s historical centers, that those students would go back to their classes and their schools with a great

understanding of American history.

So that legislation has 230 sponsors in the House, and it is just

one of a number of things that the Federal Government is trying

to do.

Senator Gregg intends that this just be the beginning of a discussion of this subject. You have provided in your testimony and in

your work and in your lives a good record for us to publish and to

circulate to others.
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I would encourage you in the next 2 weeks, if you have something you would like to add to your testimony or something you

would like to add to the record, we would welcome it, and we look

forward to working with you and continuing to discuss American

history, civics, textbooks and standards.

Thank you very much for your time. The hearing is adjourned.
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ADDITIONAL MATERIAL

PREPARED STATEMENT OF STEPHEN D. DRIESLER

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee, the Association of American Publishers’ (AAP) School Division represents the principal trade association of the educational publishing industry for kindergarten through twelfth grade. AAP members

publish over 85 percent of all the textbooks and other instructional materials including tests and assessments used in our nation’s primary and secondary schools.

Thus, AAP has a great interest in the subject matter of this hearing and wishes

to submit for the record the views of the educational publishing industry.

Let me start out with a riddle: I am loved, I am loathed, I am immeasurably influential and controversial. I offer a road to success, yet not all respect me. I make

a mistake, I make the headlines. I am a product of years of thoughtful planning

and politicizing, but I occasionally find myself floating in a toilet bowel.

What am I?

A textbook.

It is important for members of this Committee to understand that textbooks in

public elementary and secondary schools in the United States are paid for by tax

dollars and given to students free of charge. Because textbooks are purchased with

public funds, the selection of which textbooks get purchased and used in our schools

involves a lot of public scrutiny. Textbook selection often becomes a political battle,

much like a legislative fight in which competing interests try to persuade public officials to their point of view.

It also must be remembered that in America, citizens have a First Amendment

right to complain about textbooks. As Dr. Diane Ravitch points out in her book, The

Language Police, ‘‘Battles over the political orientation of textbooks is nothing new

in American educational history’’ (p. 68).

Dr. Ravitch goes on to point out several times in her book that ‘‘the buying and

selling of textbooks is more akin to a government procurement process than it is

a real marketplace with consumer choices’’ (p. 97).

Let me elaborate on this; textbooks are usually developed and produced to meet

the requirements and specifications (often very specific and explicit) established by

the customer. Said another way, textbooks are published to meet the demands of

the school system that purchases them.

Dr. Ravitch addresses this situation in her book where she writes on page 97,

‘‘they (publishers) want to sell textbooks, and . . . they must respond to the demands of the marketplace. To succeed in this highly regulated and politicized environment, it is essential for educational publishers not to become embroiled in controversy.’’

She goes on to point out on page 98, ‘‘Publishers whose textbooks do not get

adopted in one of these States sustain an economic blow . . .’’ Dr. Ravitch further

explains the publisher’s dilemma on page 104, ‘‘Publishers spend millions of dollars

merely to prepare for a textbook adoption process. A rejection in the big States may

be the death knell not only for a series but for the publisher as well . . .’’

Literally, publishers often find themselves damned if they do or damned if they

don’t follow the guidelines set forth, not only by State or local Boards of Education,

but guidelines established by national organizations like the National Council of

Teachers of English and the International Reading Association (NCTE–IRA), or the

American Psychological Association.

Dr. Ravitch acknowledges the publisher’s dilemma on page 71, ‘‘Textbook publishers were in an impossible situation. On the one hand, they were pressed on all sides

to be studiously neutral by removing every point of view and every potential controversy from their books; on the other, fundamentalist parents complained that the

textbooks’ neutrality was a failure to take a stand on behalf of correct morality. The

harder the textbook editors tried to make their product inclusive of all points of

view without endorsing any, the more impossible it was to satisfy the Christian New

Right and those who did not share its fundamentalist theology.’’

To give members of this Committee a better understanding of how detailed and

specific bias and sensitivity guide lines imposed on the publishers by a State can

be, I have attached the California ‘‘Standards for Evaluating Instructional Materials

for Social Content.’’ In her book The Language Police, Dr. Ravitch points out ‘‘California’s standards send a clear signal to publishers about what is and is not acceptable in textbooks (and other instructional materials) adopted by the State’’ (pg. 107).

California is our Nation’s largest State and as such, it is also the single largest

purchaser of textbooks. The economic reality for an educational publisher is, if they

want to sell textbooks in California, they have to follow these guidelines.
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California is not the only State with such guidelines, according to Dr. Ravitch,

Over 40 States ‘‘adhere to the NCTE–IRA standards’’ (pg. 124).

The economic reality on publishers to conform to these standards was recognized

by Dr. Ravitch on page 85 when she writes, ‘‘no publisher could afford to enter a

statewide adoption process with a textbook whose contents had been branded as racist or ageist or handicapist or biased against any other group.’’

In conclusion, publishers are accountable for aligning the textbooks they publish

to a multitude of content standards established by State and local education agencies. Only instructional materials that conform to these standards will be purchased

by these educational agencies. Most State and local school systems invite their citizens to review and comment on textbooks up for adoption.

AAP members are committed to producing the highest possible quality textbooks,

tests and other instructional materials, within the parameters established by our

customers.

AAP members would welcome any changes in the textbook selection process,

which would increase the focus on the pedagogical quality of the materials themselves. But, we also believe these changes must originate in the local communities

with parents, teachers and school officials determined to resist the politicizing of

public education and textbook selection.
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[Whereupon, at 11:40 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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